Huge discussions on traffic engineering forums about this.

One salient point: Eleven million cars is about one percent of the cars on the road.

Having said that, those 1% won't be distributed evenly, they will concentrate in urban areas.

But the traffic engineering community is struggling to understand how autonomous vehicles will fit in with the traffic stream, and what infrastructure changes will be necessary.

The future will be interesting!

@1, it's going to be amaaazing.

No way in hell will humans be taken out of the equation. For one, what happens if there's a failure of the guidance or sensor systems? For another, planes can already fly themselves and we still put crews in the cockpit.

More likely, you'll see cars that are mostly autonomous but require human from time to time.

Where will the electricity come from? Hint: coal fired plants, natural gas plants, hydroelectric plants.

Now, if you could just take humans out of the equation, the world will be a much place.

There have already been many reported failures with various drive-by-wire cars (electronic throttle control). Do you really think that self-braking cars will be immune to bugs, hackers, mechanical failure..etc?

I'm curious, Paul - do you have any data on how autonomous/semi-autonomous control of planes, trains and boats have reduced (or increased) accidents?

@3 and 6, We manage to kill well over a million of ourselves every year driving.

Considering the massive double standard we have when it comes to the acceptable level of machine vs. human failures, I'm willing to bet self-driving cars will do better.

There's a weird LAW about the incompetent always being promoted rather than accepting responsibility for some big screwup. Whole teams of screwups have taken positions promoting autonomous vehicles. Their only real talent is an ability to appear like they know what they're talking about. A nationwide search for candidates led to public relations positions being filled by exceptionally smug
Seattle know-it-alls. Question:
Why do certain East Indian women express themselves
in harsh monotones with endless sentenses?
Answer: Nobody in Seattle listens, or,
Seattlers listen only to their own inner babblings.
Seattle Sucks.

I cannot wait for this. Flying cars? Well, that can wait. I'm buying one of these as soon as humanly possible. Gimmie.

As long as they give free transponders to pedestrians and bicyclists, to protect them from autos, I could support this.

Well, at least for two or three days, which is about how long it will take for a couple of 14 year olds to figure out how to play "Grand Theft Auto" for reals with other people's cars.

I would love to have a car that includes the failsafe to automatically brake when I am in danger of colliding with another vehicle. I admit I have to slam on my brakes more often than I should, because my mind is temporarily outside the car while in traffic.

@9 damn straight. Start in DC around 9 pm., give the car an address in Chicago, read a while, go to sleep, wake up the next morning in Chicago. Of course, you'll still need to shower, but man, it's gonna make road trips awesome.

@7 I see you still believe in the myth that technology will make us 100% safe, secure, and happy--with no downside.

@12 They have this thing in Europe kinda like that. It's called "rail". You can fit a dozen or more in one car and you can sleep. But fuck the Europeans.

1962 called and they are still waiting for our personalized jet packs that they all seriously thought we'd have by now.

@7, who's we? It's under 35,000 in the US, not that that's anything fantastic, but it's a lot better than it was a few decades ago. If you're talking about "the world", and you believe that self-driving cars are going to feature prominently in Africa, China, India, Malaysia, etc. anytime soon, you're delusional.

The family of the first person who dies in a crash involving a self-driving car is going to sue the government, the car company, and the guidance-system company for more money than anyone has ever heard of, and they're going to win. Assisted driving is going to happen, but never unattended self-driving. And Google cars will never happen (unless they sell the technology to a real car company).

@11 Your situation is far more likely, but I've been in situations before where relying on the car braking itself could have ended really badly: I saw a car going sideways (on the highway) and was able to start slamming on the brakes before he even spun around into my lane and hit me head on. A smart car would have us colliding closer to 60 than the 20 that really happened. Of course if the other driver also had a smart car, this probably would have never happened in the first place...

@13, Nope. I just trust it more than I do people when it comes to tasks like driving. Sure it will fail, but unless it fails as much or more than we do it will be an improvement.

@16 World wide. Sure, not soon, but probably in our lifetime.

That is exactly the double standard I am talking about. We hold machines to a much higher standard than we do people.

Sounds like a maintenance nightmare of problems and expense.

As cool as this sounds, we should remember that any network is hack-able. So the NSA, Russian mafia or 4chan will be able to steer your car from the comfort of a remote location.

Yeah, but then congress will pass the motor laws and nobody will be allowed to drive.

My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about
He says it used to be a farm
Before the Motor Law
And on Sundays I elude the eyes
And hop the Turbine Freight
To far outside the Wire
Where my white-haired uncle waits

Jump to the ground
As the Turbo slows to cross the borderline
Run like the wind
As excitement shivers up and down my spine
Down in his barn
My uncle preserved for me an old machine
For fifty odd years
To keep it as new has been his dearest dream

I strip away the old debris
That hides a shining car
A brilliant red Barchetta
From a better vanished time
I fire up the willing engine
Responding with a roar
Tires spitting gravel
I commit my weekly crime

Wind
In my hair
Shifting and drifting
Mechanical music
Adrenaline surge...

Well-weathered leather
Hot metal and oil
The scented country air
Sunlight on chrome
The blur of the landscape
Every nerve aware

Suddenly ahead of me
Across the mountainside
A gleaming alloy air car
Shoots towards me, two lanes wide
I spin around with shrieking tires
To run the deadly race
Go screaming through the valley
As another joins the chase

Drive like the wind
Straining the limits of machine and man
Laughing out loud with fear and hope
I've got a desperate plan
At the one-lane bridge
I leave the giants stranded at the riverside
Race back to the farm
To dream with my uncle at the fireside

When it's our fault, we're sort of ok with that. When it's something invisible, OMG WTF THE WORLD IS ENDING. See also: nuclear power with fewer deaths per megawatt hour than any other type, because people die installing solar panels more than have died from radiation from accidents, yet radiation is invisible and therefore terrifying.

WTB Rationality.

@18 And who do you suppose will design the systems, program them, maintain them, and fund them? Robots?

@5 - what electricity? the sensors in the current prototype vehicles run off the power generated by the engine, and no external infrastructure specific to these cars has been developed to this point.

if you're speaking about plug-in electric cars, then yes, that power may be generated by any method- but autonomous cars may more than offset the power they consume w/ sensors by requiring less in the way of headlight/instrumentation, and infrastructure for driving might require much less power (lights/ signals) if we look a ways out.

@21: a classic. Had to go listen to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAvQSkK8Z…

Really, really do not want this.

@24: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_m…

The intersection of the future!

http://vimeo.com/37751380

@29, that's why this will never and should never come to pass: because the infrastructure will be designed by people who think that looks like a good system.

Yes, with self-driving cars, we can at last get AVO (average vehicle occupancy) down below 1.0. We can achieve automotive nirvana -- more cars than drivers!

@29,
I got to 298,567 points on that game before the level 3 boss destroyed all my ships.

@30 Nah its a great system, why? Well because it doesn't actually involve bikes on the road. If you let bikes share the road with automated cars, sure car on car accidents will drop, but you'll still have accidents involving bikes. At that point, its going to be difficult for douchebag cyclists to blame all their problems on douchebag drivers.

@33 maybe then we can start having the discussion about how cars themselves are inherently dangerous instead of doing the American thing and blaming the driver for failing in an inherently untenable system.