Important roles for Europe include assembling the rover on its side of the Atlantic and using a British-designed autonomous navigation system when the vehicle is on Mars.
Back in 2010, avionics manufacturer Rockwell Collins successfully demonstrated a fully autonomous landing system in a stock single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza.
Diplomacy arises out of the fundamental character of the nation-state system, with its basic assumption that nation-states are autonomous, often divergent in their interests and unequal in their power.
Called ARGUS-IS (both named after the mythological eye guy and an acronym for Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance - Imaging System) this guy straps a 1.8 gigapixel camera to the bottom of an A-160T Hummingbird robot helicopter.
Even when semi-autonomous driving capability is available on vehicles, the system will have operational limitations based on external factors such as weather and visibility of lane markings.