People who remain skeptical of self-driving cars simply aren’t paying attention. The biggest news in the past week is that Ford’s chief executive, Mark Fields, has pledged that his company will have “fleets” of totally self-driving cars–with no steering wheels or pedals–in American cities by 2021.

His wording makes it appear that Ford will not only sell the cars to consumers, but offer Uber-like car-sharing services itself. To help it reach this goal, Ford recently purchased SAIPS, an Israeli company specializing in machine learning and sensing.

General Motors, meanwhile, spent $1 billion acquiring Cruise Automation, a company that the Antiplanner considered to be pretty fly-by-night. This company had promised to turn any 2012 or later Audi into a self-driving car for $10,000. I think all it really did was add adaptive cruise control and lane centering, so cars could drive themselves on freeways, but not on city streets, nor could they navigate from one place to another. Yet GM appears to have been impressed.

For a lot less than $1 billion, Uber purchased Otto, a company designing self-driving trucks. Uber presumably wants to use Otto’s technology for its cars, not to enter the truck market.

Uber has also agreed with Volvo to have each company invest $300 million in self-driving car technologies. They are beginning their partnership with the introduction of 100 self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh. The cars will have a driver ready to take over if necessary and their service will be limited to the downtown area, but they are planning to offer free rides, at least to start. Volvo has already been testing its self-driving XC90 in Stockholm and has offered to test them in London.

It’s clearly a race, with GM, Ford, Volvo, and other traditional auto makers competing with Google and other high-tech companies (which probably should include Tesla), while Uber and Lyft (which received a $500 million investment from GM but failed to persuade GM to buy it outright) ready to apply the first self-driving vehicles to their fleets.

The Antiplanner doesn’t like to make predictions, because it simply encourages the planners. But in this case, I continue to predict that self-driving cars get here sooner than most people think and that they will change the world in ways that few people can conceive of today.