The first cars bold enough to drive themselves

The quest for self-driving cars began over a century ago with Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo's 1904 Telekino system, which used wireless signals to remotely control a three-wheeled vehicle from 100 feet away. Through decades of experimentation—from 1920s radio-controlled demonstrations in Ohio and New York to General Motors' 1958 highway tests using buried electric circuits—engineers steadily developed the foundation for today's autonomous vehicles, proving that machines could navigate without human drivers long before modern Silicon Valley companies entered the field.