KIA and corporate cousin Hyundai build some efficient EVs that challenge industry leaders like Tesla. Yes, Elon an his minions are miles ahead in self-driving tech, but the Hyundai Kona EV and KIA Niro EV are world class cars that come close to meeting Elon’s plea to other manufacturers to build compelling electric cars.

The problem is, KIA and Hyundai don’t have a dedicated battery electric platform. Both the Kona and Niro share their underpinnings with hybrid and plug-in hybrid models. A pure battery electric car may be coming soon from KIA, however. Recently, Hyundai said it is planning to bring two new all electric models — the 45 Concept and the Prophesy Concept — to market this year and next. Both will be built on the company’s new Electric Global Modular Platform known internally as E-GMP.

Tesla’s progress with artificial intelligence and neural nets has propelled its Autopilot and Full Self Driving solutions to the front of the pack. This is the result of the brilliant work of a large team of Autopilot directors and staff, including Tesla’s Senior Director of AI, Andrej Karpathy. Karpathy presented Tesla’s methods for training its AI at the Scaled ML Conference in February. Along the way, he shared specific insights into Tesla’s methods for achieving the accuracy of traditional laser-based lidar with just a handful of cameras.

The secret sauce in Tesla’s ever-evolving solution is not the cameras themselves, but rather the advanced processing and neural nets they have built to make sense of the wide range and quality of inputs. One new technique Tesla’s AI team has built is called pseudo-lidar. It blends the lines between traditional computer vision and the powerful point map world of lidar.

Traditional lidar-based systems rely on an array of lidar hardware to provide an unparalleled view of the world around the vehicle. These systems leverage invisible lasers or similar tech to send a massive number of pings out into the world to detect surrounding objects.

Google announced in late 2010 that for the past year, Californian drivers had been sharing the road with a secret self-driving car project. Many years and one death at the hands of rival Uber later, we can finally see 2009’s testing footage.