An unprecedented proliferation of autonomous driving technologies has been observed in recent years, resulting in the emergence of reliable and safe transportation services. In the foreseeable future, millions of autonomous cars will communicate with each other and become prevalent in smart cities. Thus, scalable, robust, secure, fault-tolerant, and interoperable technologies are required to support such a plethora of autonomous cars. In this article, we investigate, highlight, and report premier research advances made in autonomous driving by devising a taxonomy. A few indispensable requirements for successful deployment of autonomous cars are enumerated and discussed. Furthermore, we discover and present recent synergies and prominent case studies on autonomous driving. Finally, several imperative open research challenges are identified and discussed as future research directions.