# What is a self-driving car?

An episode of [Science for Kids / Science's Not Boring: The Kids Science Podcast](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1896928296), 27 Jul 2026, 13 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2624612/episodes/19518175-what-is-a-self-driving-car.mp3

Buckle up for a wild ride into the future! Have you ever wondered what it would be like to ride in a car that drives itself—with nobody touching the steering wheel? Join Mira and Finn on Science is Not Boring as they explore the amazing robotic brains behind self-driving cars! Discover how these futuristic vehicles use an incredible technology called LiDAR to shoot millions of invisible laser beams every second, creating a massive 3D video game-style map of the world. You won't believe how smart they are! Did you know a modern robot car uses over one hundred million lines of computer code? That is way more than a giant flying passenger jet! We'll also travel back in time to the 1980s to meet Ernst Dickmanns and his crazy five-ton self-driving van. Plus, we'll answer a special listener question about a real-life transforming sports car from Slovakia that grows giant wings and actually flies through the clouds! Get ready to explore spinning lasers, super-fast robot brains, and the high-flying future of engineering! Tap play and let's hit the road!

## Transcript

[0:46] SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Science is Not Boring by Kidopoly.com.
[0:50] SPEAKER_01: I'm Mia! And I'm Finn.
[0:52] SPEAKER_01: We love investigating the weirdest and wildest science facts in the universe.
[0:57] SPEAKER_00: Before we dive in today, we have a very special shout-out to send.
[1:01] SPEAKER_00: A massive hello to Mia, who is six years old and lives all the way in Los Angeles.
[1:07] SPEAKER_01: Hi Mia! We hear that you absolutely love engineering, and you specifically asked us to talk about flying cars.
[1:15] SPEAKER_00: This entire episode is dedicated to you, Mia.
[1:19] SPEAKER_00: Okay, Finn, buckle up, because I have a mind-blowing number for you.
[1:23] SPEAKER_00: Are you ready?
[1:24] SPEAKER_01: I am always ready for a wild number.
[1:27] SPEAKER_01: Hit me with it.
[1:28] SPEAKER_00: A self-driving car doesn't just look at the road, it processes over two million pieces of data every single second, just to know exactly where it is in the world.
[1:40] SPEAKER_01: Two million?
[1:41] SPEAKER_01: Every single second?
[1:43] SPEAKER_01: My brain hurts just trying to count that fast.
[1:46] SPEAKER_00: Yep.
[1:47] SPEAKER_00: And while your tablet might have a few million lines of code to run video games, a self-driving car runs on more than 100 million lines of computer code.
[1:57] SPEAKER_01: That is an unbelievable amount of math.
[2:00] SPEAKER_01: So we are talking about actual robots driving us around on the highway?
[2:04] SPEAKER_00: Exactly! Today we are exploring the amazing engineering behind self-driving cars, how they think and how they make choices.
[2:13] SPEAKER_01: But how do they even see the road?
[2:15] SPEAKER_01: Do they have giant electronic eyes hidden somewhere?
[2:18] SPEAKER_00: They have something way better.
[2:20] SPEAKER_00: We are going to talk about spinning laser scanners, robot cars driving at 110 miles per hour, and yes, Mia, real flying cars.
[2:30] SPEAKER_01: So if a robot car doesn't have human eyes, how does it avoid crashing into everything on the street?
[2:36] SPEAKER_00: It uses a super advanced technology called LIDA.
[2:39] SPEAKER_00: That stands for light detection and ranging.
[2:43] SPEAKER_01: Light detection.
[2:45] SPEAKER_01: So it actually uses beams of light to see the world around it.
[2:49] SPEAKER_00: Exactly! If you see a self-driving car on the road, look for a giant spinning cylinder on top of its roof.
[2:56] SPEAKER_01: Like a really fast robot hat spinning around up there.
[3:00] SPEAKER_00: Kind of.
[3:02] SPEAKER_00: That cylinder is packed with lasers.
[3:04] SPEAKER_00: It shoots out invisible infrared lasers in every direction, hundreds of times faster than you can blink.
[3:11] SPEAKER_01: Whoa, it shoots lasers?
[3:14] SPEAKER_01: How many are we talking about here?
[3:16] SPEAKER_01: Hundreds?
[3:17] SPEAKER_01: Thousands?
[3:18] SPEAKER_00: Some top-tier lidar systems shoot over 2.6 million laser pulses every single second.
[3:25] SPEAKER_00: That's enough to map a whole city block in an instant.
[3:29] SPEAKER_01: Over 2 million lasers a second?
[3:32] SPEAKER_01: That is completely impossible to even picture.
[3:35] SPEAKER_00: The lasers bounce off cars, trees, people, and even tiny stray dogs, and then reflect right back to the sensor on the roof.
[3:44] SPEAKER_01: And the computer just times exactly how long the light takes to come back.
[3:48] SPEAKER_00: You got it! Because light travels at a constant speed, the computer can calculate the exact distance of everything around it, down to the millimetre.
[3:57] SPEAKER_01: So it creates a giant map using nothing but light?
[4:00] SPEAKER_00: Yes.
[4:01] SPEAKER_00: It builds a massive three-dimensional map called a point cloud.
[4:05] SPEAKER_00: It's exactly like seeing the world inside a video game matrix.
[4:09] SPEAKER_01: But wait, what about the colour of traffic lights?
[4:12] SPEAKER_01: Lasers can't see the colour red or green, right?
[4:15] SPEAKER_00: Good catch! That's why self-driving cars also use normal high-definition cameras to see colours, and special radar to see through heavy fog and rain.
[4:25] SPEAKER_01: Okay, this sounds like incredibly futuristic technology.
[4:29] SPEAKER_01: When did scientists first figure this out?
[4:32] SPEAKER_01: Like five or ten years ago?
[4:35] SPEAKER_00: Try the 1980s! Let's travel back in time to 1987 in Germany.
[4:41] SPEAKER_01: 1987?
[4:43] SPEAKER_01: My parents were kids back then.
[4:45] SPEAKER_01: Cars barely had cassette players, let alone robot laser brains.
[4:50] SPEAKER_00: True! But an amazing aerospace engineer named Ernst Dickmans wanted to teach a car to see.
[4:57] SPEAKER_01: Ernst Dickmans?
[4:59] SPEAKER_01: How did he do it without modern microchips and tiny computers?
[5:02] SPEAKER_00: He took a massive 5-ton Mercedes passenger van and completely packed the inside with heavy giant cameras and early computer processors.
[5:13] SPEAKER_01: A five-ton robot van?
[5:15] SPEAKER_01: It must have looked like a spaceship inside.
[5:17] SPEAKER_01: Did it actually work?
[5:19] SPEAKER_01: It did!
[5:20] SPEAKER_00: They tested it on a completely empty autobahn, which is a famously fast German highway, and it drove by itself at 60 miles per hour.
[5:30] SPEAKER_01: No way! A self-driving van going 60 miles an hour in the 1980s!
[5:35] SPEAKER_00: Yes, but he didn't stop there.
[5:38] SPEAKER_00: In 1995, his team built a much sleeker car that drove 1,000 miles across Europe.
[5:45] SPEAKER_01: 1,000 miles?
[5:47] SPEAKER_01: Did a human driver have to grab the wheel to help?
[5:50] SPEAKER_01: Almost never.
[5:51] SPEAKER_00: It even changed lanes automatically and safely passed other cars at speeds up to 110 miles per hour.
[5:59] SPEAKER_01: 110 miles per hour without holding the steering wheel?
[6:02] SPEAKER_01: That is so fast! I would be completely terrified.
[6:07] SPEAKER_00: And the craziest part?
[6:09] SPEAKER_00: It did all of this with less computer power than a basic smartwatch you would wear on your wrist today.
[6:15] SPEAKER_01: If the computers were that weak back then, how incredibly smart are they now?
[6:19] SPEAKER_00: Unbelievably smart.
[6:21] SPEAKER_00: Remember how I said at the very beginning that a modern car has 100 million lines of computer code running through its brain.
[6:30] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that sounds like a totally massive number.
[6:33] SPEAKER_01: But what does it actually mean in real life?
[6:36] SPEAKER_01: How big is 100 million?
[6:38] SPEAKER_00: Well, to put it in perspective, think about a giant Boeing 787 passenger jet, which flies hundreds of people across the ocean.
[6:47] SPEAKER_00: That entire plane only uses about 14 million lines of code.
[6:52] SPEAKER_01: Wait, wait, wait.
[6:54] SPEAKER_01: Are you seriously telling me a car has way more computer code inside it than a massive flying airplane?
[7:01] SPEAKER_00: Yep.
[7:01] SPEAKER_00: Flying high in the sky is mostly just empty space.
[7:05] SPEAKER_00: But driving on the ground is super unpredictable, with pedestrians, bicycles, stray animals, and other cars everywhere.
[7:13] SPEAKER_00: So it takes a massive computer brain to do it safely.
[7:17] SPEAKER_01: Okay, that makes sense.
[7:19] SPEAKER_01: But what if we combine them?
[7:21] SPEAKER_01: What if a car could just fly right over all that traffic?
[7:24] SPEAKER_01: Mia in Los Angeles specifically asked about flying cars.
[7:28] SPEAKER_00: Mia, you are in luck, because this is the absolute coolest part.
[7:33] SPEAKER_00: Meet the Kleinvision Air Car, a real flying car built by brilliant engineers in Slovakia.
[7:40] SPEAKER_01: A real flying car, like in a sci-fi movie?
[7:43] SPEAKER_01: Is it a helicopter or does it look like a regular car?
[7:46] SPEAKER_00: It is a sleek sports car that literally transforms.
[7:50] SPEAKER_00: It has four wheels and a regular body, but there's a giant propeller hidden right on the back.
[7:56] SPEAKER_01: How does it actually fly?
[7:58] SPEAKER_01: Do wings just pop out of the doors or something?
[8:01] SPEAKER_00: Yes, pretty much.
[8:02] SPEAKER_00: In less than three minutes, the tail slides backward and huge wings unfold to a wingspan of 27 feet.
[8:11] SPEAKER_01: 27 feet?
[8:12] SPEAKER_01: That's as long as a whole school bus just sticking out of a sports car.
[8:16] SPEAKER_00: Exactly! It climbs all the way to 10,000 feet in the air, and it flies at an incredible 155 miles per hour.
[8:25] SPEAKER_01: That is so fast! And when you land at the airport, you just fold the wings up and drive it home on the highway.
[8:32] SPEAKER_00: Exactly! You don't even need a taxi.
[8:35] SPEAKER_00: It costs around$800,000, and they plan to start delivering them to lucky buyers in 2026.
[8:43] SPEAKER_01: $800,000.
[8:45] SPEAKER_01: I better start saving my weekly allowance right now.
[8:49] SPEAKER_00: It might take a while, but even regular self-driving cars on the ground are completely changing the world.
[8:56] SPEAKER_01: Why do we want them so badly anyway?
[8:59] SPEAKER_01: Humans are pretty good drivers most of the time.
[9:02] SPEAKER_00: We are, but humans get sleepy on long road trips.
[9:05] SPEAKER_00: We get distracted by our phones or the radio, and our physical reaction time isn't perfect.
[9:11] SPEAKER_00: How fast do we react when something goes wrong?
[9:14] SPEAKER_00: The average human driver takes about 0.7 seconds to one and a half seconds just to realise they need to step on the brakes.
[9:22] SPEAKER_01: That sounds fast, but at highway speeds you travel a long way in one second.
[9:28] SPEAKER_01: What about a computer?
[9:30] SPEAKER_00: A lidar sensor never gets tired.
[9:32] SPEAKER_00: It scans the entire road around it 10 to 30 times every single second.
[9:38] SPEAKER_01: So it spots danger almost instantly before a human would even notice.
[9:43] SPEAKER_00: Right.
[9:43] SPEAKER_00: Plus, humans cannot see well in the dark.
[9:47] SPEAKER_00: But an Ousta lidar sensor can detect a matte black car at night from 150 metres away.
[9:54] SPEAKER_01: 150 metres?
[9:56] SPEAKER_01: That's about one and a half football fields in total darkness.
[10:00] SPEAKER_01: I would definitely crash into that.
[10:02] SPEAKER_00: Haha, exactly.
[10:04] SPEAKER_00: Computers don't need streetlights to see.
[10:06] SPEAKER_00: They don't get distracted by cool billboards, and they never, ever blink.
[10:11] SPEAKER_01: That is wild.
[10:13] SPEAKER_01: I think I want a self-driving car right now.
[10:15] SPEAKER_01: Alright, Finn, time for the quiz.
[10:17] SPEAKER_00: Are you ready?
[10:18] SPEAKER_01: I think so.
[10:20] SPEAKER_01: Lay it on me.
[10:21] SPEAKER_00: First question.
[10:22] SPEAKER_00: What does LIDAR stand for?
[10:28] SPEAKER_00: Next one.
[10:29] SPEAKER_00: How many data points can a top LIDAR scan per second?
[10:36] SPEAKER_00: Question three.
[10:38] SPEAKER_00: Who was the aerospace engineer who made a self-driving van in the 1980s?
[10:43] SPEAKER_00: Here's number four.
[10:44] SPEAKER_00: Roughly how many lines of code are in a modern car?
[10:51] SPEAKER_00: Last question, what is the name of the real flying car built in Slovakia?
[10:59] SPEAKER_00: Great job! Let's see how you did.
[11:03] SPEAKER_00: The first answer is light detection and ranging.
[11:06] SPEAKER_00: For question two, over 2.6 million points per second.
[11:12] SPEAKER_00: Number three, the answer is Ernst Dickmann's.
[11:16] SPEAKER_00: Question four, about 100 million lines of code.
[11:20] SPEAKER_00: And the final answer is the Klein Vision Air Car.
[11:24] SPEAKER_01: Wow! From a chunky 5-ton van in the 80s to sleek cars that literally grow wings and fly.
[11:32] SPEAKER_01: Engineering is just incredibly awesome.
[11:35] SPEAKER_00: It really is.
[11:36] SPEAKER_00: It makes you wonder what kind of wild machines we will be driving or flying 20 years from now.
[11:43] SPEAKER_01: Hopefully something I can actually afford to buy.
[11:46] SPEAKER_00: If you loved learning about the amazing flying air car today, please give us a five-star review.
[11:52] SPEAKER_00: Just scroll down on your podcast app and tap the five stars.
[11:56] SPEAKER_01: Yeah, tap those stars.
[11:58] SPEAKER_01: Oh, and don't forget to check out our site kidopoly.com.
[12:02] SPEAKER_01: We have tons of fun learning games and activities there.
[12:05] SPEAKER_00: It's true! Head over to our site kidopy.com for lots more cool stuff to explore.
[12:12] SPEAKER_00: And if you want a shout out on the show or just want to say hi, send us an email at hello at kidopoly.com.
[12:19] SPEAKER_01: We would love to hear from you and put your name in an episode.
[12:22] SPEAKER_00: See you next time on Science Is Not Boring.
[12:26] SPEAKER_00: Bye everyone!

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