Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vehicular automation is technology that assists or replaces the operator of a car, truck, aircraft, rocket, military vehicle, or boat. In assisted vehicles a human remains responsible, while in autonomous vehicles the technology handles all perception, monitoring, and control.
Hans Moravec built the Stanford Cart in the late 1970s while he was a graduate student, producing the first experimental autonomous vehicle. It ran on four bicycle wheels and could steer around obstacles in a room 100 feet long, though each crossing took about 5 hours.
At least 113 accidents linked to autonomous vehicles had occurred by 2018. Separately, Google said in 2015 that its self-driving cars had failed at least 272 times in testing, requiring human drivers to intervene around 13 times to prevent fatalities.
The Ultimate Urban Circulator, or U2C, a driverless shuttle project in Jacksonville, is estimated to cost $379 million. It replaces the Jacksonville Skyway monorail with driverless vehicles able to run on the existing elevated structure and on ordinary roads.
A PwC Strategy and Report analysis estimated self-driving trucks could affect around 3 million truck drivers in the United States. It also flagged around 4 million further jobs in gas stations, restaurants, bars, and hotels along trucking routes.
Self-driving shuttles have generally focused on low speeds, around 20 mph, on short fixed routes for the last mile of a journey. A 2021 survey of more than 100 European shuttle trials found this low speed was the leading barrier to wider adoption, alongside a per-vehicle cost of around 280,000 euros.