Ford.com

A screenshot from a Ford video shows how Active Park Assist works in the Flex model. Drivers just need to target a spot, and the car uses ultrasonic range finders to park itself.

Do you want a future where C-3P0 and his robotic pals do the driving as you text your friends the 411 on the next stop in a crosstown pub crawl? Minds capable of making this dream come true want your opinion.

Students with Stanford University's Center for Automotive Research have prepared on online survey to find out your robotic car desires. After providing a few generic personal details, you can weigh in on questions such as:

• How much control you're willing to give up to an automated self-driving technology? All? Some, like an airplane pilot? None at all?
• Would you take a cab driven by a robot? Choices range from "Definitely not" to "Definitely would. There is no way a computer can drive worse than current human cab drivers :)".
• What are your feelings about a car that could drive you without any input? Choices include: "Excitement – where can I get one," "Party time – I can go out partying without having to worry about drinking and driving," and "Fear – That's it. Run for the hills. The robots are taking over."

To take the survey, click here. When the results are out this spring, we'll share the details.

More on robotic cars:

• Road rage at driverless cars? It's possible
• GM researching driverless cars
• With these autonomous cars, who needs to drive?
• Cars are approaching 'auto' pilot mode
• Audi to climb Pikes Peak without a driver 
• Google tests cars that steer without drivers
• Google self-driving car crash caused by human

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. You can also follow him on Twitter.

For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Hiriko

Hiriko is a foldable electric car unveiled Jan. 24 in Europe. It is designed to fit in tight parking spaces and be part of car-sharing programs.

The commercial version of a two-seater foldable electric car that driver and passenger enter through a pop-out windshield was officially unveiled this week in Europe.

The car, called Hiriko, is powered by four in-wheel motors that each turn a full 90 degrees. Its compact — and compactable — design coupled with four-wheel steering should allow parking in the tightest of spaces on crowded city streets.

The concept is based on the electric CityCar created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, and commercialized by a consortium of automotive companies in the Basque region of Spain.

Hiriko, which is Basque for "urban," made its debut at a ceremony Jan. 24 by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission in Brussels.

With electric motors in the wheels, there's no need for a gas tank or traditional gasoline engine, transmission and gearbox, allowing the rear of the car to slip under the chassis. 

When folded, three of the cars can fit in one traditional parking space.

MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab's CityCar, which is the car Hiriko is based on, is compared to standard-size automobiles and a Smart car.

The MIT Media Lab envisions the cars finding a home in car-share programs where members drive any available ride around the city and parking at widely distributed charging stations.

The cars have a reported range of 100 km (62 miles) per charge, making them well suited for in-city driving in compact European cities already accustomed to small, fuel-efficient vehicles.

While the vehicles should appeal to cities and consumers keen to save money and the environment, the Economist notes that "supercompact cars have not done nearly as well as their proponents had hoped."

One of the hurdles, IHS Global Insight analyst Tim Urquhart told the magazine, is that cars like Hiriko are low value, low price, "and, therefore, they are low margin" — not much of a money maker.

Time will tell if these little electric rides find market acceptance. The first car-sharing trial is slated for Malmo, Sweden's third largest city, the Guardian reports. Other cities around the world have reportedly expressed interest, including Berlin, San Francisco, and Hong Kong.

Commercial production is slated to begin in Spain next year. The cars will cost 12,500 Euros each to build. A video of the unveiling ceremony is below.

More on electric car technology:

• Paris to launch electric car-sharing program
• Electric cars meet the real world
• So far, battery cars coming up short
• Recharge that electric car … wirelessly

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

Paul Sakuma / AP

Stanford graduate student Mick Kritayakirana shows the computer system inside a driverless car on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif.

The road to a future where we jump in our cars, enter a destination, and let them do the driving could be filled with rage, according to an expert on driverless car technology.

For starters, driverless cars will likely be programmed to obey all traffic laws. They won't speed and will always come to a complete stop at stop signs, for example.

Throw just a few of those law-abiding robots on roads clogged with 250 million human-controlled cars, and there's bound to be some shaken fists, or worse.

"Let's face it, … [we] don’t always follow exactly the traffic rules," Sven Beiker, the executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University in California, told me Friday. 

"An autonomous car would probably need to because there's a company putting code into a system and that obviously then becomes a legal action."

20-year vision?
The road rage-at-the-robot scenario came up as we discussed the evolution of driverless car technology and how we might eventually realize the dream of texting while the robot does the driving.

It'll likely remain a dream, Beiker said, for the foreseeable future.

Some experts in the field, he noted, call it a 20-year vision. "Quite frankly, if someone says 20 years, that's basically telling you we don't really know," he said.

But, driver-assisted technologies such as cars that can park themselves, maintain a safe distance from other cars on the road, and have other crash-avoidance technologies are increasingly available on cars today.

All of these technologies, Beiker said, still require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road. But those aids are becoming more common, and not just in luxury models.

"These things are definitely happening, and basically you can expect something new every year in that regard," he noted.

Technological, legal, cultural hurdles
When the field will reach the point where we can relinquish control of the car will depend, in part, on further technological developments, a new set of laws — and a cultural shift.

From the technological standpoint, cars can and do drive themselves today (see the Google Street View cars, for example). So, in a sense, we are technologically there.

But a future of roads full of driverless cars would be enhanced by the development and deployment of a wireless communication system that lets the robots anywhere on the road talk to each other.

Such a system, for example, would let cars know if the car in front of it was planning to turn left or right, as well as provide points of traffic congestion that alert robot drivers to alternate routes.

Think of such a system as a radio traffic report on steroids.

Roads full of autonomous vehicles all talking to each other could be much safer than they are today, Beiker noted. After all, human error contributes to 95 percent of all accidents. 

But, "no technology is 100 percent safe," he said.

When a wreck happens, who gets the blame? That's unclear today. Stanford's automotive center has a legal fellow, Bryant Walker Smith, on staff precisely to help answer these types of questions.

It'll probably shake out one of two ways: Either the car owner and/or passenger will be legally responsible just as drivers are today for most accidents, or the manufacturer will be.

But until such laws are written — and there are some are in the works, such as in Nevada where a law has been passed to make driverless cars legal — it's unlikely that autonomous cars will rule the roads.

And then there's the question of how to deploy the robots once we're technologically and legally ready. Perhaps at first autonomous cars will be restricted to one lane of travel on certain roads, such HOV lanes.

"But mixing the conventional vehicle and the autonomous vehicles?" Beiker said. "That's quite a challenge."

More on driverless car technology:

• GM researching driverless cars
• With these autonomous cars, who needs to drive?
• Cars are approaching 'auto' pilot mode
• Audi to climb Pikes Peak without a driver
• Google tests cars that steer without drivers
• Google self-driving car crash caused by human

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.