Milken 2014: Driverless cars due in five years

LOS ANGELES -- The notion of a self-driving car -- a serene environment where drivers can relax, read and let the car do the piloting -- could be as little as five or six years away.

Even on the long end of estimates, Ford Group Vice President Raj Nair says he expects his company to come through with one by 2025.

A packed room came to hear such predictions Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference here.

Many of the technologies needed to produce a fully self-driving car are in cars today, speakers agreed. Cars that have lane-keeping systems, that can park themselves and those with adaptive cruise control have taken the first step to self driving. Even today's Ford Fusion has the electric power steering, brakes, transmission and throttle that would be necessary elements of a self-driving car, Nair says.

Some maker, such as infiniti and Mercedes-Benz, offer cars that drive themselves on freeways -- as long as the driver closely monitors them. Nissan has vowed to market self-driving cars by 2020.

Google, whose high-profile experiment into self-driving Toyota Priuses thrust the possibilities to the fore, now has 700,000 miles of actual driving on its self-driving cars. Millions of miles come from simulators, says Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car program. It's being driven around city streets and engineers are being allowed to take it home.

There's no turning back. Urmson calls it an "inevitable march." He says he can even envision a day when families have a single car. It will be able to drops off family members one by one at work on school on weekdays, then return for the others.

Self-driving cars hold the promise of improving road safety. As such, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is doing its best to foster the new technology. "One thing I want want is to make sure we don't stand in the way of this," says Kevin Vincent, chief counsel for the agency.

There's also a promise of improved fuel economy. Robotic cars can be run together in groups only a few feet a part when their computers all talk to each other they act as one. The practice is called "platooning" and when it has been demonstrated in trucks, they have saved about 10% on fuel, says Christian Gerdes, director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University.