Last year, Uber and Carnegie Mellon University jointly announced plans to open a $5.5 million “Uber Advanced Technologies Center”, an autonomous vehicle research center near CMU’s campus. Just this January, General Motors announced a $500 million investment in Lyft, with the goal of creating an on-demand network of self-driving cars. Rumors persist that Google and Ford are entering into a partnership to build autonomous cars, although the hotly anticipated announcement at this year’s CES did not occur. Is a driverless future just over the horizon? Not quite – Google’s still figuring out how to make autonomous cars safe, insurance underwriters are still struggling with how to insure driverless vehicles, and GM’s investment has yet to yield any tangible steps forward, for now.