Mobility as a service is a great idea. The problem is that a lot of people think it's a great idea. What I mean is, let's say I ride a Citibike over to the supermarket and park it in a dock, where there are a bunch of other bikes. It's not an unusual event that by the time I'm done shopping, all of the bikes are gone.

Eindhoven-based car-sharing service Amber provides BMW's electric i3s and not bikes. And to get around the distribution problem, they've hired a small army of students to locate their cars each night, wherever they're parked, and drive those cars back to within walking range of where their customers will likely need them the next morning.

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Alas, those students' jobs will be short-lived. Amber is launching autonomous cars that behave differently from how we typically think of robocars: During the day they are ordinary automobiles, 100% piloted by the driver using them. But at night, when the cars are empty and there's little traffic, they'll turn themselves on and slowly drive themselves, along bus lanes only, back to their centralized distribution points.

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"Autonomous driving is crucial for the future of mobility," Amber CEO Steven Nelemans said in a press release. "If we want to be able to offer a mobility service that's more efficient, convenient, and affordable than car ownership itself, we need autonomous cars in order to make sure that people have access to mobility at all times."

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Surprisingly, these cars will be on the road this year, in a matter of months. "Autonomous driving is not as far in the future as you might think," Nelemans said. "We're a small company, which means that we can achieve this faster than many others can."