Electrical Engineering is a key element in the advancement of autonomous cars, also known as self-driving robot cars.. Columbia University student Patcharinee Tientrakool wrote a conceptual thesis of how vehicles will be able to communicate safely and effectively by a process of what she calls Reliable Neighborcast Protocol. Her study reviews/shows the differences of when cars do and when they do not communicating as a team with each other. She arrived at the conclusion that allowing vehicles to work together it would increase the efficiency of transportation by nearly 273%.

UC Berkley’s Transportation Institute student, Steven Shladover also makes similar hypothesis predicting that cooperative automatic cruise control will dramatically increase the efficency of everyday street/highway traffic.

Autonomous cars has been a new trend most recently with the University of Michigan $25 million project and Google’s Self-Driving Fleet which has hit 300,000 miles.