IT was, few years ago, described as a science fiction. Today, the phenomenon of driverless vehicles has become a reality, thereby advancing the frontiers of science and technology beyond the vision of some automobile experts.

Indeed, preparations have reached advanced stage towards the showcasing of driverless vehicles at the consumer electronics show in United States of America (U.S.A) next week.

Concerns were, however, being raised about the feasibility and marketability of these self-driving cars, otherwise known as autonomous or driverless vehicles, in Nigeria, despite the passion of the country’s super rich for wonder wheels.

The experimentation of the driverless vehicles by renowned automobile companies in Europe, Asia and the U.S may be hilariously greeted in these markets.

But doubts still remains if these sophisticated vehicles, when officially launched to the world market in two years time can berth in Nigeria.

With Nigeria’s aspiration to join the league of the top 20 world economies in the year 2020 through the Federal Government’s Vision 20:2020 initiative, stakeholders have expressed their pessimism on the plight of the nation’s automobile industry, saying, “before any country could be considered as an industrialised country, its automobile sector must have attained self-reliant in terms of manufacturing of vehicles or spare parts of vehicles.”

All these are still missing in the Nigerian context.

As the U.S’s car show comes alive next week with these automobile solution vehicles, stakeholders are of the view that Nigeria was not prepared for the unveiling of the driverless vehicles based on the country’s state of bad roads, low technologically know-how and the infant stage of Global Positioning System (GPS).

According to automobile expert and Managing Director, Newsletter Nigeria Limited, Dr. Oscar Odiboh, Nigeria could be classified as a big country where it’s super rich or few rich people go for the best automobile or any latest car wheelers launched in abroad.

He said that if the driverless vehicles are launched in Europe and the U.S, in the next 24 hours, few Nigerians will make order for it since most of these automobile companies have their affiliates or branch offices here in the country.

But Odiboh explained that bringing the vehicles into the country is not the problem, but rather the state of Nigerian roads and the country’s low technology, adding that the Nigeria is yet to be adjudged as a “systemic advanced country.”

“Anything that is produced around the world will definitely find its way into Nigeria almost immediately. We have individuals, who are super rich and who will go for things like that (driverless cars). I have no doubt in my mind, we will have some two or five individuals that will have this car if launched today. Then it will now become a status symbol. But having said that, what is befalling the ordinary vehicle that we have in this country will also befall these driverless vehicles when they hit the country’s market.

“Firstly, the roads are still bad. Secondly, we do not have a systemic maintenance culture. That is to say, we don’t have a maintenance culture embedded in our system even as a people. We acquire, we use, we spoil and we throw away things.

“For instance, we build a whole house, fill it with modern gadgets, after few months or years, all the facilities, utilities within the whole house are down.

“They are no longer working. It is the same things as cars here in Nigeria. Today, people are buying Toyota cars. There was a time nobody talked about Toyota in this country. There was a time it was Mercedes Benz or nothing.

“There was a time it was Peugeot or nothing. We can’t maintain something long enough. So, if our roads are poorly maintained and we don’t have a systemic maintenance culture, I can tell you that those cars will come and suffer the same faith.”

For Manny Philipson of the Stallion Motors, the time is not yet ripe for driverless vehicles to ply the Nigerian roads because of the infrastructure and low-level technological challenges facing the nation’s economy.

He said the Federal Government has a lot to do towards the revitalisation the country’s auto industry.

According to him, government must convince Nigerians that it was committed to turn around the nation’s infrastructure, but driverless vehicles may not make an entry into the country in the next 10 years, if government maintained the current status quo.

“The condition of our roads is not good enough for that kind of technology. It is possible of course in Europe where the roads there are automated with the traffic lights and the roads are serially mapped. The drivers out there are also very sensible and very traffic conscious unlike here. So, it would be hard to introduce such a technology here in Nigeria. We could travel to overseas to see how it’s drive-like. Definitely, it can’t work in Nigeria as of now; going by the kind roads we have.

“Going also by the technology level in Nigeria, I don’t see that coming into Nigeria in the next 10 years. As long as we still maintain the same level of roads, the same technology, definitely, a driverless car we not drive in Nigeria,” Manny said.

Google may have received all the hype for self-driving cars, but both Toyota and Audi are showing off their own driverless solutions at the consumer electronics show next week.

Toyota is showing off one of its luxury models- the Lexus LS 600h, equipped with radar and camera equipment.

Similarly, Audi hasn’t revealed much about its self-driving vehicle, but it noted that it’s bringing a car that can find a parking spot and park itself without a driver, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Automakers have been slowly adding computer-assisted features to their vehicles, like parallel parking assistance and the capability to nudge cars back into their lines if they veer out.

But it was Google that proved fully autonomous vehicles are possible when it announced its ambitious project in late 2010 (at which point the cars had already covered more than 140,000 miles without human intervention).

Google claims self-driving cars will ultimately save lives, since they remove the human element that’s often the cause of accidents.

Partially due to Google’s efforts, Nevada approved self-driving car regulations in early 2012 and granted Google a license to test its vehicles in that state.

Like the 1990s search engine companies, who were trounced by Google’s breakthrough search, car companies will be quick to show they’re keeping up with Google’s self-driving innovations.

For consumers, this race toward fully autonomous cars is a good thing. Within 10 or 20 years, adding self-driving capabilities to your car could be as easy as cruise control today.

This is nothing new or special. The first wave of semi-autonomous cars will be out in 2015. So far Cadillac being the only ones to promise them and I can’t see Ford being too far behind. Others like Audi and Volvo have been showing these off too.

Ford has self-parking cars. This is really nothing too new and what Google accomplished was great, it’s not anything the car folks like myself haven’t been expecting.

Advances such as the driverless car are no longer the stuff of sci-fi. They could soon make many human skills worthless.

Almost without noticing it, our world crossed a significant threshold last week.

The Governor of California, Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that will allow driverless cars on to his state’s roads from 2015.

In so far as most people noticed this event at all, they probably sniffed derisively.

For some, it’ll be seen as an example of techno-hubris “flags on the moon stuff” as one of my acquaintances put it.

For others, it will be seen as yet another confirmation of the proposition that the continental United States slopes gently from east to west, with the result that everything with a screw loose rolls into California.

Governor Brown signed the bill at Google’s HQ in Mountain View. This was good PR on his part, but it also made sense because Google has led the charge into autonomous or driverless vehicles.

For several years, Toyota Prius hybrids that have been specially adapted by the company’s engineers have been driving the roads of California.

To date, they have logged 300,000 miles with only one accident caused by a human-controlled car that ran into one of them. And they have now logged 50,000 miles without a human having to take the wheel.

At the ceremony in Mountain View, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, announced the company’s intention to bring autonomous vehicles to the market in five years.

In a pre-emptive attack on critics, he pointed out that autonomous vehicles would be significantly safer than human-controlled ones. That seems plausible to me, 40,000 people are killed every year in road accidents in the US and many, if not most, of those are caused by human error.

“This has the power to change lives,” Brin said. “Too many people are underserved by the current transport system. They are blind, or too young to drive, or too old, or intoxicated.”

He also argued that manual operation of cars was inefficient, autonomous vehicles could make better use of the road and reduce the size of car parks by fitting into smaller areas than humans could get them into.

Economists in the U.S are increasingly puzzled by the fact that even after its recession officially ended, the rate of job-creation is much lower than expected and the mean length of time for which people are unemployed has rocketed to 40 weeks, twice as long as that observed during any previous postwar recovery.

Economic theory says that when companies begin to grow or become profitable again, they buy equipment and hire workers. But that isn’t happening. Companies are still buying kit, but they’re not employing workers.