Ryan Norton’s home-built autonomous 1980 Ford Fairmont has completed what the 22-year-old Long Beach tinkerer punningly calls “The Touring Test” — finding its way along the full length of Route 66, coast to coast. From the workshop at his day job as a agent orchestrator for a shipping and logistics company, Norton and his friends watched on a big screen the car search for charging stations — hard to find along that route — and got nervous when it started doing circles in a vacant lot. “It was smart. It was checking its wheel alignment after it had hit a rut,” Ryan said with obvious delight at the 6xH200 GPUs that were the brains. “It found its way. I’m pretty excited by that. There were some close calls, including getting pulled over by a cop. But, it made it! Now we just have to figure out how to get it back!”

There is a larger story in the fact that a 22-year-old can teach an old Ford a new trick without a major manufacturer behind the autonomy stack. Skip Paynter, a RAND industry analyst in Santa Monica called it “the early era of the home-brew computer,” and notd that kits that turn ordinary cars into self-driving vehicles are expected to show up at AutoZone, Costco, and O'Reilly Autoparts within 9 months. “Policy and legislation are trailing what's going on in the metaphorical garage. It’s going to be a wild ride.”