Two automotive teams on epic journeys we’ve reported on previously are making great progress toward their goals. The Vislab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge is in Samara, Russia, a few hundred miles north of the Kazakhstan border. An ostensibly driverless tour from Parma, Italy to Shanghai, China is planned to arrive at its destination on October 10, 2010, 21 days before the end of the World Expo being held there. On the way, two pairs of vehicles are testing Vislab’s goal “to move goods between two continents with non-polluting vehicles powered by green energy and with virtually no human intervention.” As noted in this blog, the Italian team is running two pairs of Piaggio vans on a route emulating but not duplicating Marco Polo’s 13th century trek to China and back. Polo spent much of the first part of the voyage on a ship and docked near Iraq’s western borders before setting off inland. After 24 years on the road, he returned to …