John Markoff:

Not so boring?
 
 This month, I stirred up the blogosphere when I wrote that my brief ride in a Google self-driving Lexus with two other reporters was “boring.”
 
 There was a lot of breathless coverage of Google’s press event, which culminated with the company’s piling reporters three at a time into the back seat of a sensor-full autonomous vehicle for a five-mile jaunt through traffic in the Silicon Valley community where the company has its headquarters.
 
 To me, what was striking at the time — aside from being cramped in the back seat — was the seemingly routine nature of autonomous driving, based on Internet-connected navigation technology that Google has been working on for more than four years.