I was a few hours outside of Los Angeles, tooling down I-5 at the wheel of a sleek Audi A7 on a gorgeous day when a little girl in an SUV smiled and waved. I waved back.

With both hands.

This immediately freaked her out, and she started jumping up and down. All I could do was laugh, knowing my vigorous wave was in no way a safety hazard. In fact, I hadn’t touched the steering wheel in more than an hour.

What that little girl didn’t know, despite the stickers on the car, was that I was piloting Audi’s latest autonomous vehicle, a prototype designed specifically to handle the monotony of highway driving. The, er, driving was not nearly so difficult as the preparation—an arduous task that required a day of training in Arizona, a ream of paperwork and a little bureaucratic wrangling that resulted in the great state of California issuing me a license to operate an autonomous vehicle.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AnLqt4jLYdg