Italian scientists celebrated the completion of a remarkable experiment in July 2010 when two specially equipped electric vans arrived in Shanghai after driving more than 13,000 kilometers from Parma, crossing twelve countries including Russia and Kazakhstan without a human hand on the steering wheel for the vast majority of the journey.

The vehicles, developed by the VisLab research group at the University of Parma under the direction of Alberto Broggi, used a combination of laser scanners, cameras, and GPS to navigate roads that ranged from well-maintained European motorways to the unpredictable rural highways of Central Asia. A human driver was present in each vehicle to take control in situations the autonomous systems could not handle — city centers, border crossings, unusually complex traffic scenarios — but for approximately 94 percent of the journey, the vans drove themselves.

The achievement was not lost on the automotive industry, which had been watching autonomous vehicle development with a mixture of interest and skepticism. The VisLab experiment demonstrated something that laboratory testing could not: that autonomous driving technology was robust enough to function across different road surfaces, varying weather conditions, and traffic environments that differed radically from the structured environments in which most autonomous systems had previously been tested.

The journey took three months. The vans consumed significantly less energy than conventionally driven vehicles on the same route, a consequence of the autonomous systems' tendency to maintain steady speeds and avoid the acceleration and braking patterns that human drivers produce. The research team documented every failure mode encountered along the way, producing a dataset of autonomous driving challenges that would inform the next generation of their work.

In the decade that followed, autonomous driving went from academic experiment to the central focus of the automotive and technology industries. The vans that drove from Italy to China were early proof that the idea was not fantasy.