GM, parts suppliers, university engineers and other carmakers all are working on vehicles that could revolutionise short- and long-distance travel.

And today, GM chief executive Rick Wagoner plans to unveil a prototype of a self-driving Chevrolet Tahoe sport utility vehicle at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The vehicle has been developed with the help of Carnegie Mellon University.

'This is not science fiction,' Mr Larry Burns, GM's vice-president for research and development, said in a recent interview.

The vehicle, nicknamed the 'Boss', is capable of handling itself in a controlled setting such as the carpark at the Las Vegas Convention Centre, but not on a regular street with obstacles such as pedestrians.

GM plans to use an inexpensive computer chip and an antenna to link vehicles equipped with driverless technologies so that a self-driving vehicle would know where all the other vehicles are around it, dramatically reducing accidents, GM spokesman Scott Fosgard said on Sunday.

Much of the technology that already exists for vehicles to take control of the wheel includes radar-based cruise control, motion sensors, lane change warning devices, electronic stability control and satellite-based digital mapping.

The carmaker expects driverless vehicle technology to be ready for testing by 2015, and in vehicles that it sells by 2018, said Mr Fosgard.

These self-driving vehicles are likely to be first driven on highways; people would have the option of choosing a driverless mode on highways while opting for control of the vehicle on local streets, Mr Burns said.

The vehicle that GM is showing this week won a contest sponsored by the US Defence Department last November that required vehicles to drive themselves for close to 100km in a mock urban setting.

Mr Sebastian Thrun, co-leader of the Stanford University team that finished second in the contest, said GM's goal is technically attainable.

But a key benefit of the technology eventually will be safer roads and reducing the roughly 42,000 traffic deaths that occur annually in the United States - 95 per cent of which he said are caused by human mistakes.

'We might be able to cut those numbers down by a factor of 50 per cent,' Mr Thrun said.

Car companies and universities have worked on several driverless car projects over the past 30 years, some of them developed in government-sponsored competitions.

At the Tokyo Motor Show late last year, Nissan demonstrated the Pivo 2, a three-seat experimental car intended for use in crowded urban areas.

It was driven by a robot. Already, the Lexus luxury division of Toyota offers a model that can park itself.

NEW YORK TIMES, ASSOCIATED PRESS