I worked the spring and summer of 1991 at Daimler-Benz as an intern on their autonomous vehicle (VITA, a 7-ish meter bus at the time). This was the 2nd generation bus and I think the immediate predecessor to the S-class mentioned in parent comment. We’d sometimes test in Munich or Turin with the other European auto marquees, but mostly tested on an abandoned stretch of Autobahn just outside of Stuttgart.

I worked on the vision system (as in [under the direction and guidance of my boss] wrote all the code to improve frame rate from 5Hz to 10Hz, double the processing resolution (to around 128x96 IIRC), and implemented Kalman filtering for preceding vehicle detection and ranging). System was built in Occam on Inmos transputers. Each was about $15K and roughly the power of a 486 but with fast, reliable message passing. We could auto drive (lane follow and distance keep only) using only vision, but not especially reliably; it would fault and give up every 3-15 minutes, depending on lighting and roadway conditions. Partially wet, drying roadways remained a big problem as I left at the end of the summer.

Really cool internship. Part of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project

VITA image: https://goo.gl/images/Cz8ZuZ