These images show how far self-driving cars have come in just a few short years

We may not be zipping around in self-driving cars just yet, but the technology for autonomous vehicles has actually come a long way in the last decade.

When DARPA hosted its first driverless car competition in 2004, the possibility of self-driving cars ever becoming a reality looked bleak at best.

In fact, not one of the 15 teams that qualified for the final race finished the course and after just three hours into the 10-hour competition, only four cars remained operational.

While DARPA's first Grand Challenge competition was considered by some to be a total failure, it did set in motion the whole idea of creating autonomous vehicles. And by the next Grand Challenge in 2005, five teams' vehicles successfully finished the 132 miles course.

By 2007, which was the last year the competition was hosted, six teams finished the complete course.

Since then, tech companies and automobile companies alike have been chasing the dream of bringing self-driving cars to market. And they have made a lot of progress.

Google has already created a fully autonomous prototype and a slew of automakers have vowed to have self-driving vehicles by 2020.

But the autonomous and semi-autonomous cars we see today look a lot different than their predecessors.

To get an idea of just how much the technology has evolved, here's a look at some of the first-self driving cars that competed in DARPA's Grand Challenge during the early 2000s and the more modern self-driving cars that are being developed.