US Sec. of Transportation observing Bay Area self-driving car tech

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (KGO) -- The U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx was in Silicon Valley on Wednesday, taking a look at competing technologies that will drive our car industry into the future.

Foxx isn't favoring one over the other. His overriding goal is safety.

Lots of attention has been focused on autonomous, or self-driving, cars as the path to easing congestion and improving safety. So, too, are connected cars that use wireless spectrum to allow vehicles to communicate with each other so they won't collide.

"We do see that eventually these technologies will merge but, today, I want to make sure our agency is taking a pretty agnostic view of which one goes first," Foxx said.

His meeting with Delphi was private. ABC7 News wasn't even allowed to film him touring the facility.

We did get Foxx to weigh in on the safety of testing self-driving cars on public roads or whether they should be done off-road.

The University of Michigan is building a new 23-acre facility to test self-driving vehicles under simulated conditions. Robots will take the place of pedestrians and drivers.

"There's only so much you can learn in a lab. You do have to have it out in real-world environments to some extent, and so opening the net a little bit more so that you can have test sites that can give you a little more of a real-world scenario is important," Foxx said.

Foxx stresses his goal is improving safety and allowing vehicles to operate closer together. But for others, on the horizon is new-found transportation freedom.

"With self-driving cars, literally everyone I speak to, from my 75-year-old mother to my 7-year-old boy, thinks it's going to solve their personal problem, whether it be getting to school and getting to their soccer match or actually having a mobility solution because they don't have one at all right now," Google X Self-Driving Car Project's Sarah Hunter said.

Much of the research is being done here in Silicon Valley.