So General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner says the company expects to have driverless cars on the road by 2018.

Now, I know the autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe SUV that GM developed with Carnegie Mellon University (pictured above) did win the Urban Challenge competition held last fall by the U.S. Defense Department’s research agency. And I know too that this is CES, an event founded on breathless pronouncements about the future of technology. But driverless cars on the road in another 10 years? Seems an irrationally exhuberant prognostication to me. But hey, when you’re the first auto executive ever to speak at the Consumer Electronics Show, you’ve got to come heavy, right?

And Wagoner came heavy, all right. He took the stage in a Chevy Volt, the gas/electric car GM debuted in Detroit last year. “The Volt is a powerful example of beauty and brains,” he said. “It looks on the outside and the technology under the hood is truly revolutionary. We’re now over a year into our production engineering for the Volt … and we’re moving as fast as we can to bring it to market.”

Wagoner went on to offer a brief overview of some new OnStar features–among them, “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown” and GM’s new collision-avoidance technology before moving on to flex-fuel vehicles. “There’s a huge opportunity to reduce the growth in oil consumption, oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Wagoner said. “And it lies in the fuel used by our cars and trucks. Ethanol offers tremendous potential here. … There are already many flex-fuel vehicles on the road right now that could be running on ethanol, if it were more readily available. … Now, if all of the flex-fuel vehicles that the major carmakers have already built–plus those that we’ll build over the next 10 years–were to run on ethanol, we could save 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually. … And that’s billion with a ‘B.’ “

And what of those autonomous vehicles Wagoner mentioned? Well, they’re still a ways off. But they’re coming (supposedly). And when (and if) they finally arrive, they’ll be God’s gift to terminal commuters. Said Wagoner, “Autonomous driving means that some day you’ll do your email, eat breakfast, read the newspaper–while commuting to work. Essentially, you could do all the things you do right now while commuting to work, except you could do them safely!”

Doesn’t seem so ingenious now, though. Not when a “View All Friends” command might reveal People’s Liberation Army operatives. According to senior U.S. officials, the Chinese military hacked into a U.S. Defense Department network in June. The breach to systems serving the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates forced the Pentagon to take the network offline for more than a week. “The PLA has demonstrated the ability to conduct attacks that disable our system? .?.?.? and the ability in a conflict situation to re-enter and disrupt on a very large scale,” a former official told the Financial Times. Another said there was “no doubt” that China was now monitoring email traffic on unclassified government networks.

Beijing denied the claims, which come as Chinese President Hu Jintao prepares to meet with President George Bush at the APEC summit in Sydney, Australia. “The Chinese government has consistently opposed and vigorously attacked according to the law all Internet-wrecking crimes, including hacking,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu. “Some people are making wild accusations against China … These are totally groundless and also reflect a Cold War mentality.”

Perhaps. But this isn’t the first time the PLA has faced allegations like these. It was only a week or so ago that Beijing was accused of breaking into the German government’s network.

A Department of Defense policy that went into effect today bans military access worldwide to MySpace, YouTube, Photobucket and eight other popular Web sites because of the strain they place on its network. “We’re not passing any judgment on these sites, we’re just saying you shouldn’t be accessing them at work,” Julie Ziegenhorn, spokeswoman for U.S. Strategic Command, told Stars and Stripes. “This is a bandwidth- and network-management issue. We’ve got to have the networks open to do our mission. They have to be reliable, timely and secure.”

Of course. But this isn’t the first time the Defense Department has faced a bandwidth crunch. It was complaining about them back in 2003. You’d think that it might have spent the ensuing years assessing its bandwidth requirements and building out the capacity to meet it. Apparently not. It’s added just enough connectivity to support its own government-vetted YouTube channel, but not those services used by troops to keep in touch with family and friends.