Even if we owned our own self-driving cars the landscape could be significantly different. You could have your car drop you off at the movies downtown and then drive a mile away to be filed into much less accessable car filing cabinet. Urban cores won't have to provide ugly the human/parking interface. </mudede>

I think self driving cars are the modern version of jet packs for everyone.

Too many people enjoy driving Paul, as hard as that is for you to understand. And your seat belt analogy is pretty weak since most people don't enjoy going through windshields at 80 mph but many do enjoy driving.

If self-driving cars end up with greater safety, they could reduce deaths of children and people under 45 by up to 1/3! This would be a greater impact than eliminating all gun deaths (which of course, should also be a priority).

All levels of government and even philanthropists should be enabling and funding this technology with maximum safety in mind. If they do end up being safer, we should phase out current manual cars ASAP. This could be the greatest public health "win" in decades.

I'd feel sorrier for the cabbies if I could get one to simply show up at my house in the middle of SF when I ask to go somewhere other than the airport.

This old man is terrified at the idea of self-driving cars. I'm ok with other potentially automated means of transit, such as trains on rails, but the notion of trusting my fate to a human-sized remote control car that can go wherever is admittedly outside of my comfort zone.

If we're going to commit to being passengers rather than drivers, let's just embrace mass transit completely, rather than create a more difficult problem to solve.

@2 people might enjoy driving, but driverless cars will offer several advantages to entice them away from it:

1. It will probably be safer.

2. It will probably be cheaper.

3. It will be legal to read or text (or even watch TV) while "driving."

4. It will (eventually) be legal to drink while "driving." (Probably not at first, because people will be required to be ready to drive if the automatic system breaks down.)

5. It will (eventually) be feasible for relatively young children to "drive" to school, soccer practice, etc. (Again, probably not at first.) This will actually be really weird (but very helpful, especially for parents who can't afford nannies).

Parents will think hard before paying for driver's education for their children, if there is a safer/cheaper alternative. Fewer and fewer people will even know how to drive. Traffic fatalities will plummet.

And culture and geography will change, in pretty hard-to-predict ways. My own prediction: gas stations will be merged with giant garages and tucked into out-of-the-way places. Oh, and: restaurant delivery will be more feasible in sprawled-out places and so small towns will be able to support a wider variety of restaurants.

Cities will not remake the car.

Cars will remake the city!

Old topology cannot adapt to the carful lifestyle.

As someone who actually enjoys driving I hope self-driving cars aren't mandated before I'm too old to drive. I don't even want an automatic transmission, let alone a car that drives itself!

Sure, people enjoy driving, in the car commercial sense of a deserted mountain road with leaves blowing across it. Who enjoys being stuck in traffic? Give them the chance to let the car do the driving while they poke at their phones or nap, of course they're going to take it. And that's not counting the "think about the children!!!" moral panic that will take hold once 20K road deaths a year become optional.

By the way I think Paul is right that owning a private car won't make a lot of sense. Cars will be rented on a per-ride basis (or for longer trips, a per-day basis), and a big issue will be who controls the flow of traffic. A centralized, coordinated traffic management system will be feasible, but should it be run by the government? A monopoly? A consortium of providers? Or should traffic be left uncoordinated?

It will also be possible to have dynamic speed limits, and it will be possible for dispatchers to automatically clear a path for emergency vehicles.

Also, it will be easier to "switch" lanes so that in the morning you have more inbound lanes and in the evening more outbound lanes (or whatever). Entire streets could switch from one way to the other, since it can all be managed centrally by computer.

Basically lots of potential for huge improvements.

Self driving cars are clearly the future and offer a lot of options and potential for making our transportation systems vastly more efficient. For a trip in the city, you could have electric cars. For a drive to the country, you could have a diesel vehicle. High speed car carriers could be developed for long distance trips, and less infrastructure would be needed because you could optimize density and separation distances.

The "buses and bikes are the ONLY solution" folks will likely complain. Good for them. In the meantime, society will be able to advance with smaller and more efficient vehicles that you can still maintain your privacy within and be able to operate conveniently.

@11: There would be no need for speed limits. Speed limits are just a legal kludge to deal with the safety issues of human interaction with a complex engineering system. Take out the human and you take out the requirement. In fact, the vast majority of traffic laws would be voided and obsolete.

George W. Bush vs. Elon Musk
Who was right about the future of hydrogen cars?

For many people, hydrogen fuel cells might be a better option than electric batteries. To convert the hydrogen to energy, a device called a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell first strips electrons off the hydrogen atoms, creating positively charged hydrogen ions. Those ions combine with oxygen from the air to form water as a waste product. The electrons provide the energy that drives the car’s electric motor.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and…

Mutimegawatt Fuel Cell Parks remake the Urban Grid

http://youtu.be/PJaXkQZ3XOQ

@2 People don't like driving. They like the speed and convenience of personal point-to-point transportation. If they liked driving, they wouldn't spend so much time behind the wheel checking their email & stuff.

I think self driving cars a bit of an inevitability, but the automobile industry is so slow to embrace modern technology. There are lots of technologies which we could use now to make cars safer by allowing the car to react to situations which occur too fast for the driver to notice, but they are only available on very high end cars.

If Nissan has a self driving car commercially available in 2020, how long will it be before there is a mainstream self driving car?

I'm okay with the technology and efficiency of self-driving cars—but you know how the medical, financial, legal, real-estate and higher-education juggernauts have all gained sufficient power to extract a double-digit percentage of your income and/or savings as a middle-class person?

Once owning and operating a personally driven vehicle is verboten (because it interferes with the safety and minimum spacing of automated transport modules), the price of even short custom trips will be escalated by the cartels to the point of unaffordable luxury. Most of us proles will be back to shanks' mare for our daily errands.

Recreational driving, where the point is the driving and not where you're going, is a small minority of overall driving. There's no reason why in a future where most driving is automated, manual driving couldn't remain in some places as a hobby. I suspect it would become about as common as horseback riding is now.

I look forward to self-driving cars and hope they are widespread by the time I'm too old to drive safely. I will admit that it would take me some time to get over the habit of having a driver in control, and that I would probably wait a few years after commercial introduction before adopting the technology. The one problem I see is the transition period, where automated cars are common but manual cars are still numerous. I would expect most people in automated cars to be very hostile after a while to the manually-driven (and more dangerous) cars on the road, particularly since some of the applications of the technology will be impossible with manually driven cars on the road. I suspect at some point, it will become illegal to drive outside of a recreational track or other recreational areas such as national forest roads where road standards are poor but driving conditions are adventurous. Or maybe some lanes in populated areas will be set aside for the manual drivers and the rest will be fully automated.

@18 ("If Nissan has a self driving car commercially available in 2020, how long will it be before there is a mainstream self driving car?"):

Not long. Airbags, anti-lock brakes, crumple zones, traction control, collision avoidance, and self-parking either have worked, or will work, their way down from the most expensive to least expensive autos.

Here's a question we should probably start asking ourselves:

In a world of widespread automatic cars, what roads would best be reserved for manual driving?

At some point that's going to be a key question, so we might as well start thinking about it. I'd say winding rural roads and remote and scenic single-lane highways would be the best, whereas city streets and freeways are pretty much incompatible with recreational driving. Maybe the key would be to require automated vehicles everywhere, but allow manual driving on those routes, knowing that it would make fully-automated spacing and other innovations (on those routes only) impossible.

@17 Plenty of people like driving. That's the main motivation to spend extra money on sportier cars and expensive tires (tires, NOT stupid giant chrome wheels). If they just wanted their butts hauled quietly from one place to another with adequate comfort and reliability, everyone would buy a Hyundai or Camry or Explorer.

1. There will be automated Google "Street View" cars roving the cities, constantly updating Google Maps, business listings, etc.

- 1.1 Will all rural towns get the Googley "Street View" treatment as well? How about forest roads?

2. Bad Hackers will figure out how to hack Robo-Taxis and that will be a mess!

3. Rebooting your car at 70mph will probably suck. (joke)

4. Car repair will become even MOAR expensive than it is now, because computers.

5. Self-Driving Robo Semi-Trucks? will those occur and put long-haul truckers out of work too?

6. What will we do with the legions of the unemployed taxi drivers and truckers?

@17 - People like the speed and convenience of personal point-to-point transportation... because our infrastructure is designed explicitely for cars, and we have no other real options here. I like the speed and convenience of subways and urban trains --to say nothing of the urban design-- in Europe much better than owning a fucking car. But your other point about people not liking driving generally, remains salient and true.

7. People will finally start reading and tweeting much more. Finally!

8. Robo-City Buses?

9. Will "Discover Passes" decline?, because people will get dropped off at the trailhead, and the car will go park somewhere else outside of the forest boundaries?

10. Robo Getaway Cars. Or other neat crimes where a robo-car does something unexpected because the humans are up to something nefarious.

11. Who will be the first to equip their robo-car with a weapon? Will small EMP weapons become more common as crooks will need to instantly trash robo-cop cars, while they drive away in their gasoline-powered speedster?

12. More naps!

Good times!

By 2020? In America? No way. No frigg'n way. The legislation governing everything from road rules, infrastructure, to liability will take a great deal longer than a decade to sort out. Maybe 2030-40. Maybe.

Not so many years ago, people thought that automated roadways would require a rail with a tracking arm extended from each vehicle, or at the very least magnets or something embedded in the roadway and sensors on the bumper.

The technological leap worth highlighting is that it's now all dependent on digital models of the drivable world, combined with 3-dimensional GPS and pretty heavy-duty onboard computing power and artificial intelligence. Thus, the current infrastructure, potholes and all, is entirely sufficient without further modifications. Autonomous vehicles can be added at whatever rate the market requires or allows without much in the way of complications.

However, I expect that fairly early on, personally driven vehicles will be forced to have transponders advertising their status to central computers. Autonomous vehicles will need to maintain more space from personally driven vehicles because of unpredictability and slow wetware reaction times. Eventually the system will come to "resent" the space needed by personally driven vehicles, and taxes/registration on them will escalate accordingly.

@26:

Eventually the system will come to "resent" the space needed by personally driven vehicles, and taxes/registration on them will escalate accordingly.

Is that when the robot revolt starts? I for one hope that it is a Matrix-style revolt and not a Maximum Overdrive-style revolt. That latter movie sucked.

Terrific post and (most) comments. Talk about impacts on society with the car post ww2 -- it could be of a like scale.

1. Combine the "auto auto" with car sharing like Cars-2-Go.

2. The impacts on urban form are incredible e.g. Fewer parking lots and garages so great for cities and for urban inning commercial suburban areas.. Likewise suburban residential expansion can continue to expand.

3. Scared of NSA and the surveill state? It could get worse -- NSA will know where you have been at all times. Your whole life.

@14 - it is true that speed limits in their current form would not be necessary, but it's hard to imagine that we wouldn't control the speed at which cars move. For instance, will we really not put a cap on the speed at which cars can drive near schools? In residential areas? That seems implausible. So we'll still have speed limits, it's just that "speed limit" won't mean a legally prohibition but rather a choice reflected in the traffic-management software that controls cars. But because the speed limit is driven by software, it can be changed flexibly depending on the circumstances.

There's no way I'm more scared of computer-driven cars than I am of human-driven cars. The biggest difference that nobody is talking about is that these cars will actually follow the law. Pedestrians will have a much easier time -- cars will stop at stop lines, yield to pedestrians at crosswalks, obey speed limits near schools, pass cyclists in a legal manner, etc.

A very high percentage of cars break the law routinely. Don't believe me? Look how many tickets SPD was able to issue in ONE DAY:
http://www.fremontuniverse.com/2011/04/1…

From a sustainability point of view, however, this is a total fantasy. Increasing efficiency of cars will NOT result in the overall decrease of resources. It will encourage more sprawl and horrible land use decisions. Increasing MPG and increasing car safety is doing the wrong the right, not doing the right thing.

Sargon Bighorn @7: Cars are the solution to all our problems.

I look forward to the day when 90% of America's GDP will be devoted to three things: automotive transportation, medical care, and military spending. And you know what? It's all worth it because it will make all our lives better.

Brad Templeton has been writing about the coming of self-driving cars for years. His site worth reading if you're interested in this: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

Apparently, Seattlites NEED self-driving cars. I've always thought a thumbnail description of the drivers here would be "slow and cautious, yet incompetent." Looks like I got the last part right, anyway.

http://www.king5.com/traffic/news/Seattl…

Seattle-based Center for Advanced Transportation and Energy Solutions (CATES) is funded by the University of Michigan to assess the sustainability of battery-powered automated vehicles. Fewer crashes, lower emissions. How do we get there?

More at http://www.facebook.com/aboutcates/

I didn't have to scroll too far down to see someone make the self-driving cars == no more people are allowed to drive bullshit. It's a choice you fucking twats. Either the car drives you or you drive the car and the car lets you choose. If you want to drive you get to drive, if you don't want to drive you don't have to. Someone call Glenn Beck, Obama's army is taking away my freedomz to drive!