Toyota trotted out a driverless Lexus Advanced Safety Research Vehicle at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, with no specific timeline on when it would deliver the technology. At the same CES, Audi introduced what it termed a "self-piloting" car, but said it would be at least a decade before it was ready for the road. Meanwhile, Nissan announced later that year that it would have its Autonomous Drive Technology available to consumers by 2020.

Since then, most major automaker have stated that they'll also have some form of self-driving car on the market around the beginning of the next decade, if not sooner. And they all seem to be in a race with each other, as well as the dark horse that is Google, which has said its driverless cars could be available as early as 2017.

That's one reason it was a bit startling to hear Toyota declare last week that it won't be producing self-driving vehicles for sale to consumers. "Toyota's main objective is safety, so it will not be developing a driverless car," Seigo Kuzumaki, Toyota's deputy chief safety technology officer, said at the company's Advanced Safety Seminar in Detroit.

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That doesn't mean Toyota doesn't think self-driving technology is trustworthy: Its original entry is called an Advanced Safety Research Vehicle, after all. And after viewing demos at the Advanced Safety Seminar that ranged from Toyota's second-generation Driver Attention Research Vehicle that uses a Microsoft Kinect to keep an eye on the driver (and front-seat passenger) to futuristic 3D heads-up displays like the ones coming from Continental, the finale of the event was a ride in an almost-autonomous Lexus on a loop through Detroit.

While the car can and did drive itself with the help of Toyota's Automated Highway Driving Assist (AHDA) system, like certain models from Mercedes-Benz, the Lexus had sensors in the steering wheel that can detect when a driver's hands are removed for more than a few seconds and issue a warning. Toyota also went to great length during its event on the eve of the 2104 Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) World Congress to say it sees driving as a collaboration between the driver and technology. So you "won't be able to read a book or take a nap" behind the wheel anytime soon, as one speaker at the event put it.

Contrast this approach with Google's, whose vision of the autonomous driving future is a self-driving car sans a steering wheel and brake pedal and doesn't require any human interaction at all. (California has since stated that it will require those components if Google wants to test its autonomous car on the state's roads.) And somewhere in between are other automakers, ranging Ford to Volvo, that have shown some form of autonomous technology and a plan to bring it to market at some point.

While all automakers have different timelines and takes on delivering self-driving features to consumers, one thing they have in common are the building blocks to vehicle autonomy—driver-assist features that take over the steering and braking, to either avoid an accident or make take the tedium out of long highway drives. But even so, self-driving technology won't take a one-size-fits-all approach, save for Google.

Just as makers of other tech devices—whether smartphones, tablets, or computers—all use the same basic hardware elements and battle it out with differences in performance, styling, user interface, and software, automakers will do the same with self-driving cars. Even if they don't call the technology "self-driving."