Explained: Levels of Autonomy in Self-driving Cars

While autonomous cars have gained swift momentum since Leonardo da Vinci’s self-propelled cart circa 1500, the thought of going completely hands-free still feels slightly supernatural. These four-wheelers of the future use a combination of GPS for calculating longitude, latitude, speed, and course to navigate, LiDAR technologies, which use laser light pulses that map surroundings, and machine learning to see and understand -- but to what degree depends on the level of autonomy.