It's pedal to the metal for driverless cars
- Written by William Messner, John R. Beaver Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Tufts University

When a May 2016 crash killed the person operating a Tesla Model S driving in Autopilot mode, advocates of autonomous vehicles feared a slowdown in development of self-driving cars.
Instead the opposite has occurred. In August, Ford publicly committed to field self-driving cars by 2021. In...