On Monday, January 7th, Audi followed in Google’s footsteps by becoming the second company, and first in the automotive industry to be granted a license from Nevada that allows it to operate autonomous vehicles on the state’s public roads.

Over the past few years, Audi has been actively developing autonomous driving technology, with one of the early highlights of the program being the participation in the Pikes Peak Hill Climb course in Colorado with the Autonomous Audi TTS Pikes Peak research car.

The driver-less TTS, which was developed concurrently by Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Lab in Silicon Valley and Stanford University, was able to complete the 156-turn, 12.42-mile (20 kilometers) Pikes Peak circuit in 27 minutes.

Audi said they will provide more information on its plans for piloted driving and piloted parking technologies during this week’s 2013 Consumer Electronics Show that runs from January 8th to the 11th.