Driving is a pleasurable activity but not if you have to commute for an hour to get to work daily. A group of clever automotive and computer engineers at Southwest Research Institute took on the intellectual challenge of building a car that can drive itself. They have now built a $422,000 working prototype, which is pimped out with a $42,000 global positioning system and a $50,000 interface box to coordinate messages from 16 onboard computers running $300,000 worth of supersensitive cameras, radios and when everything clicks, the "intelligent vehicle" can navigate between street stripes, miss curbs, stop at red lights and tell the difference between a Chihuahua and a German shepherd in the road 1,000 feet away.

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The vehicle could have potential uses in a battlefield theater, and some of the technology being developed for this project could also be applied to safety equipment in civilian automobiles.