Sci Fi Short Film 2017 - Best Self Driving Cars Of Future - New Best

s the U.S. federal government issues comprehensive regulations regarding self-driving cars and Elon Musk’s Tesla refutes hacker claims over alleged car takeovers, there’s just one question on everyone’s minds: How soon before autonomous cars take over the world?

Science fiction loves a good robots-gone-bad story, but what about automobiles imbued with artificial intelligence? In his book Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan asserts that a totally hypothetical alien, observing Earth from a great distance, would assume that self-sufficient cars were the dominant form of life on our planet because the “streets of the cities and the roadways of the countryside are evidently built for [the cars'] benefit.” Still, there isn’t a huge amount of science fiction history dealing with self-driving cars, probably because future forms of conveyances depicted in science fiction have overwhelming focused on other kinds of vehicles like jetpacks, rocketships, flying cars, hoverboards, etc.


Still, the autonomous and occasionally sentient self-driving car story certainly has its place in both literary science fiction and pop sci-fi too. If we leave out totally ridiculous cars like Herbie the Love Bug or Ian Fleming’s magical Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, what we are left with is five of the best and most feared self-driving sci-fi cars of all time.

You knew this one was coming. The popular 1982 TV series Knight Rider ostensibly starred David Hasselhoff as do-gooder and hairy-chest-baring badass, Michael Knight. But, the true star of Knight Rider was obviously KITT — Knight Industries Two Thousand — a fully sentient A.I. controlling the operations of a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am. In addition to a sweet Turbo Boost mode, KITT was obviously capable of driving himself without Hasselhoff’s Michael Knight behind the wheel. Metaphorically and psychology, KITT sort of represents our fear of the self-driving car. In terms of the big stuff, KITT could have gotten the job done without Michael Knight, but everyone felt more comfortable with Michael and his liberally unbuttoned shirts at least being in the car. KITT didn’t need a driver, but because of our paranoia, he had one anyway.

Notably, the telltale back-and-forth red light on the front of KITT comes from another sci-fi robot: the Cylons from the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica. Both the Cylons and KITT were designed by famous TV producer Glen A. Larson. Battlestar even had a proto-KITT in the form of CORA, an onboard A.I. who flies Starbuck’s space fighter for him in the episode “The Long Patr