For our April event we had husband and wife duo Kevin Boehm and Sharon Santino lay out the current state of autonomous driving as well as where we are headed down the road (ok, we promise no more car puns).

If you read some of the tech press or Elon Musk’s twitter feed, then you might think that we’re only months away from just laying back and letting our smart cars do all the work, but that’s not quite the case.

Sharon and Kevin brought our flying smart car dreams back down to earth a bit by explaining many of the challenges involved, but they also showed some of how revolutionary this technology will be when it does eventually fully arrive.

As usual, most of the engineering problems are related to people and their unpredictable behavior. While the cars may be getting smarter and smarter, people will remain people.

They also laid out how it’s not an all-or-nothing process, but much more of a continuum — and while fleets of cars at scale with no steering wheels at all may still be pretty far away, there’s also lots of this technology already out there.

Please join us next month when we’ll have Jim Gianoglio from Bounteous talk about the path from Data Analyst to Data Scientist!

As a bonus, check out the cool time-lapse that Sharon and Kevin made!