Autonomous driving technologies are rapidly advancing, driven by the need for safer, more efficient, and intelligent transportation systems. A fundamental component of these systems is the perception module, which enables vehicles to understand and react to their surrounding environment. Object detection, in particular, is essential for identifying dynamic and static elements on the road, such as pedestrians, vehicles, traffic signs, and obstacles. In this work, we explore and enhance the capabilities of state-of-the-art deep learning-based object detectors within the YOLO (You Only Look Once) family, focusing on the latest versions: YOLOv10 and YOLOv11. We fine-tuned and optimized multiple variants of each model—namely, nano (n), small (s), medium (m), and large (l)—to improve detection accuracy and computational efficiency for real-time autonomous driving applications. The models were trained and evaluated on a diverse road object, and performance was measured using key metrics including precision, mean Average Precision (mAP), and Precision-Recall curves. Experimental results reveal that the fine-tuned YOLOv10n achieved a peak class-level precision of 1.00 at a specific confidence threshold (0.997), indicating that perfect precision was observed for certain classes under high-confidence conditions, while the overall mean precision and mAP metrics reflect more balanced model performance, while YOLOv11s attained the best result within its group with a precision of 0.91 at a threshold of 0.972. These findings demonstrate the potential of tailored YOLO architectures to meet the demanding requirements of real-world autonomous navigation systems.