Automakers from across the globe are hard at work preparing for the eventuality of the self-driving car. Depending on who you ask, we could see vehicles capable of doing our commuting for us sometime between 2015 and 2021. For BMW, the target date is the year 2020, and at CES 2014, the German car company revealed its first two automomous cars.

With self-driving cars not far from hitting public roads, the BMW group has presented a new element of BMW ActiveAssist during CES 2014 in Las Vegas. The new system is a safety assistance control which brings the vehicle back into line in demanding driving situations without any input from the driver. Implemented into a fleet of BMW 2 series and 6 series production cars, the highly automated driving technology demonstration managed to pilot each vehicle at high speeds on a slalom run between cones and even blasted through a wet marked out circular course without problems controlling oversteer or understeer. By 2020, BMW hopes the technical foundations should be in place for a motorway-based system that will allow highly automated driving in series-produced vehicles.