As autonomous vehicles like Stephen King’s Christine and Knight Rider’s KITT graced the big and small screens, researchers’ efforts began to bear fruit. A team at Bundeswehr University Munich transformed a Mercedes van into a self-driving vehicle called VaMoRs, and the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute turned a Chevrolet panel van into the first in its line of Navlab robot cars. (Why vans? To store all the computing equipment necessary to operate the vehicles.)