How did self-driving cars go from DARPA desert races to navigating city streets in just a decade?

The answer

The modern autonomous vehicle era began with DARPA's Grand Challenges - in the 2004 race across the Mojave Desert, no vehicle completed the 150-mile course, with the best car managing just 7.4 miles. By the 2005 event, five vehicles finished, and the 2007 Urban Challenge saw cars navigate a mock city with traffic. Google launched its self-driving car project (now Waymo) in 2009 under Sebastian Thrun, and by 2015, their fleet had logged over 1 million autonomous miles on public roads. These systems combined deep learning for perception with sensor fusion across LiDAR, radar, and cameras, turning science fiction into an active engineering challenge.