We’ve all seen them in our favorite SciFi movies and shows: cars that drive themselves: from Demolition Man to Minority Report. But how far away are we from getting our very own vehicles that will permit us to sit back, sip at our coconut drinks, and read a Tom Clancy novel in the driver’s seat while our car navigates itself?

If Google stays on track, not too much longer perhaps. According to Google’s blog, the media and search giant secretly been on track for a while now.

So we have developed technology for cars that can drive themselves. Our automated cars, manned by trained operators, just drove from our Mountain View campus to our Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard. They’ve driven down Lombard Street, crossed the Golden Gate bridge, navigated the Pacific Coast Highway, and even made it all the way around Lake Tahoe. All in all, our self-driving cars have logged over 140,000 miles. We think this is a first in robotics research.

The cars “see” using an advanced sensor suite mounted atop the car that sports video cameras, RADAR, LIDAR, GPS, and even micro-adjustments estimation based on the movements of the car. They are, indeed, right out of a SciFi novel—but they certainly don’t look it. To the casual observer, these vehicles might as well just be another fleet of random, unmarked hybrids roaming the roads with bored drivers behind the wheel.

In the interests of safety, Google does have drivers behind the wheel just in case something goes wrong and an engineer watching at all times. Still, for the most part the cars do drive themselves.

Google explains that not only do the vehicles use their own personal “knowledge” of the road to navigate but an extremely complex and hyper-aware information network that uses Google Maps and the data delivered from other vehicles. Another long-time brainchild of SciFi authors that they’re mimicking here happens to be road aware ad hoc traffic networks underpinned by the vehicles themselves. As they gather information about road conditions, traffic, obstructions, and other minute details about their trip they “inform” the other autonomous vehicles so that they have a better model to work with the next time they pass the same region. This sort of technology could be used to avoid—and possibly reduce—overall traffic congestion even if the autonomous elements don’t take the forefront of everyday driving.

Self-driving autonomous vehicle projects have been a long term staple of the US military and the DARPA project—better to field robots rather than people when lives might be on the line. And Google is taking advantage of the advances in these fields by hiring out hopefuls who have placed in the DARPA Challenges: Autonomous Car Races so we can probably expect very big things coming out of this project.

So here we are. We might as well look upon this as the rivalry between everyone’s two favorite SciFi predictions: Flying cars vs. Autonomous cars.

Anyone taking bets on who’s winning?