Meet Caroline, a self driving car created by members of five institutes of the Braunshweig University of Technology in Germany. They turned this Volkswagen car into a high tech machine that's capable of driving on its, well her own.

The first thing we always have to do if we want to compare the car to a human driver we have to rebuild his eye. That is the reason why we have all the sensors. We have laser scanners, we have radar, we have lidar, we have different kinds of camera systems. And all this information is combined to rebuild its eyes. Then if this is done we need to find a decision. And that's why we have a decision system comparable to our brain that tells the car what needs to be done. So the last thing then -what we usually do with our arms and our legs, we control the car-that also needs to be autonomously. We have our trajectory and the car needs to follow this trajectory. And that's done by electronic devices that control the steering wheel, the gas pedal and so on.

Caroline competed in the Darpa grand challenge in the fall of 2007. The challenge was created by the US Department of Defense with the mission of developing technologies to give the military a decisive edge. This challenge to create autonomous vehicles was designed to keep troops out of harms way.

Caroline placed 7th overall, but was the best team in Europe. Even though her performance was impressive, improvements can still be made.

The range of the sensors is the main problem, the computing problem is also a problem. The main thing is to combine all the things and manage the whole thing. That's the whole thing with this project.

The technology in this car costs well over half a million dollars which means the family station wagon won't drive itself anytime soon. From CEBIT 2008 in Hanover, Germany, I'm Nick Barber, IDG News Service.