At first glance it may seem that the advantages of self-driving cars are obvious. Statistics shows that 54 million people get injuries and 1,4 million people die in car accidents annually. Cars have killed more people than WWII, and the material damage caused is more than 870 billion US dollars per year.
Thus, there were attempts to design a driverless car ever since 1920s. However, somehow viable they became only with the invention of computers. In 1995 a team of engineers from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) transformed a Pontiac Trans Sport minivan, which managed to run for 4585 kilometres from California to Pennsylvania. Remarkably, the car was going autonomously all the way except for 80 kilometres, where the engineers had to take control because of road works. A tiny bit had to be finished: the system needed some alterations to exclude engineers' interference. However, it's 2020 and there's still no system, which could be totally independent on the roads. Even Waymo, taxis in Phoenix, Arizona, yet are running with an engineer, who steers in a difficult situation.