The automotive industry has been around for quite some time and it has evolved ever since, but the major transformation that is happening now from vehicles driven by humans to vehicles driven by themselves will have a long term impact on society. Today's cars are already connected and have been connected for some time, since they can link to smartphones, offer emergency roadside assistance, register real-time traffic alerts etc., but this evolution is about to change.

The automobile industry is on the brink of a revolution, to move to self-driving automobile industry, and the driving force behind this is the fast developing technology, the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT will transform the automobile industry and at the same time, the automobile industry will provide a big boost to IoT. The potential and the prospects of this technology is astonishing.

This paper examines the market and technical trends towards Autonomous Vehicles, evolution stages from early cars to fully autonomous, the importance of IoT in driving this industry ecosystem, advantages and disadvantages of Autonomous Vehincles, key issues and challenges faced by the industry, standards activities around this industry and finally the deployment use cases.

The focus of this paper is more based on an industrial push to identify issues and challenges of Autonomous Vehicles and less on any academic research activity. The intention of this paper is to bring these issues and challenges to the attention of IFAC technical committee and trigger some debate on the opportunities for IFAC research in international stability.