No Driver in Vehicle Next to You - On the DC Beltway and in Scotland

Two pretty quiet but big developments as the world edges ever closer to the Age of Driverless. 

1. The first privately-owned Google driverless vehicle has been purchased by the Scottish "ideas agency" company Equator. This is not a test. The driverless car will be ferrying actual people, staff and clients (not Google-paid "drivers") that is, from Equator offices in Finnieston (not sure if that's a different town or a neighborhood) to the Glasgow offices of its sister design agency 999.

2. The Capital Beltway, the road that practically defines the inner and outer people and areas of the Washington, DC, region, hosted a driverless test of a large vehicle, in regular traffic. No video of this driverless trip has been released. The company doing the test was AiNET, based in Beltsville, MD, right by the Beltway. The now self-driving vehicle was a reclaimed 1991 Amertek Aircrash Rescue and Fire Fighting vehicle. Yes, a fire truck that drives itself. Now all of the firefighters can wave to passersby. Cute vehice, no?

We're talking real traffic

And there is traffic at every time of a weekday on this notorious road. This is a road with lots of road splits and interchanges with other roads, and it is a road that is pretty round, sometimes with a strange shape, sometimes near a building that looks mysteriously similar to the castle in the Wizard of Oz. For trivia's sake, I must mention that for many years, right by that castle (which is actually a Mormon temple, I believe), these words appeared on a Beltway overpass: Surrender Dorothy.

This test was a 50-mile trip in Maryland on the Beltway and then through neighborhoods and into Washington, DC, into such tony, fashionable areas as Georgetown, Capital Hill, and Shaw, which is gentrifying from hipster to fashionable.