This is an excellent article if you are at all interested in AI or robotics. It is a fairly lengthy read but entirely worth the time.

Sebastian Thrun is sitting in the passenger seat of a 2004 Volkswagen Touareg that’s trying to kill him.

The car hurtles down a rutted dirt road at 35 miles per hour somewhere in the Mojave Desert, bucking and swerving, kicking up a cloud of dust. Thrun, the youngest person ever to head Stanford’s famed artificial intelligence laboratory, clings to an armrest. Mike Montemerlo, a speed-coding computer programmer and postdoc, is wedged in the backseat amid a tangle of wires and cables.

No one is driving. Or more precisely, the Touareg is trying to drive itself. But despite 635 pounds of gear - roof-mounted radar, laser range finders, video cameras, a seven-processor shock-mounted computer - the car is doing a lousy job. Thrun tightens his grip on the armrest. He’s built plenty of robots, but he’s never entrusted his life to one of his creations. He’s scared, confused, and above all furious that his algorithms are failing.

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