Self-Driving car will make trip from San Francisco to New York City

An anonymous reader writes: Lots of people decide, at one point or another, to drive across the US. College kids. Beat poets. Truckers. In American folklore, it doesn’t get much more romantic than cruising down the highway, learning about life (or, you know, hauling shipping pallets). Now that trip is being taken on by a new kind of driver, one that won’t appreciate natural beauty or the (temporary) joy that comes from a gas station chili dog: a robot. On March 22, an autonomous car will set out from the Golden Gate Bridge toward New York for a 3,500-mile drive that, if all goes according to plan, will push robo-cars much closer to reality. Audi’s taken its self-driving car from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, Google’s racked up more than 700,000 autonomous miles, and Volvo’s preparing to put regular people in its robot-controlled vehicles. But this will be one of the most ambitious tests yet for a technology that promises to change just about everything, and it’s being done not by Google or Audi or Nissan, but by a company many people have never heard of: Delphi.