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The fully automatic car may be down the road a ways, but cars that do your thinking for you are just around the corner -- they watch out for hazards, they listen to you, they read your lips, they even know when you're distracted. Alan travels to Germany to find out what happened to the research program originally intended to develop cars that would drive themselves. He finds the goal changed; DaimlerChrysler engineers now working on technology that will help the human driver by alerting him or her to potentially dangerous situations. Equipped with stereo cameras, the research cars are now able to recognize hazards that the driver may have overlooked - like bouncing balls or wayward pedestrians. In a strikingly realistic driving simulator called VIRTTEX at Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, Alan finds out for himself the distraction caused by using a cell phone in a car traveling at high speeds.