Decades before the race to build a self-driving vehicle became a multibillion-dollar contest between tech giants such as Tesla Inc and Google, a South Korean professor built an autonomous vehicle and test-drove it across the country — only for his research to be consigned to the scrapheap.

Han Min-hong, now 79, successfully tested his self-driving car on the roads of Seoul in 1993 — a decade before Tesla was even founded…

Raj Rajkumar, an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, who reviewed the 1990s footage for Agence France-Presse, said that it “appears to be on par with some of the best work on autonomous vehicles during that period.”

“The professor and a colleague are not even in the driver’s seat — very bold, confident, but very risky thing to do,” he added. “It is unfortunate that funding for that project was cut. In hindsight, that was certainly not a wise decision.”
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