What you’re looking at is a future with a drastic reduction in vehicle fatalities, most of which are caused by people breaking the laws (speeding, running lights, inattentive driving). Automated vehicles will not break the laws, and will cooperate nicely with each other. The more of these we have on the streets, the safer we’ll be. If collisions do occur, they will most likely be minor, and the reasons for those collisions can be researched and fixed. Mechanical failure is always a possibility (as it is with current cars), but statistically this will be far safer than what we have now.

We should be pouring tons of money into this research. I can imagine a day when nobody drives at all. Plus it will save gas, open up green space, and cops can find better things to do besides sitting around issuing traffic tickets.

I only use my car for a good 30 minutes to an  hour each day.  That means that for over 95% of the day it is just sitting there.  I don’t car pool because my schedule is too erratic and I need mildly flexible work hours.  I am pretty typical.

Now, consider what I might do in the world of autonomous cars.  I wake up each morning and, 5 minutes before heading out, I slap a button on my phone declaring I need a pickup. I am a bit of a cheap bastard and really just want to get to work, so when “my car” pulls up, it is really a small bus.  It is has a dozen folks in it that are a semi-regular crowd of people who all work roughly in the same area as me and who often go to work at roughly the same time.  The crowd changes as people shift their schedules and people need to arrive to work early or late.  The bus takes an optimal path, not really going much out of its way to pick up a couple of other people on the way.  It then drops people off, again, taking an optimal path so that it never really goes out of its way.  The normal highway traffic is gone, as most cars are autonomous and coordinate their movements so that the four lane highway is now overkill.  Add on to that the fact that there are simply fewer cars because many people who commute decide to go cheap and just snag an autonomous bus on the way to work, and you will find the roads are basically empty.  The fare is cheap.  The bus, plans its own rout to maximize speed and passengers.  There are no ‘regular’ routs.  All routs are custom made on the fly based upon people requesting rides.

When I leave work, I leave late.  Further, I’m grumpy and so not in the mood to share and want to get home quicker.  By default, I normally call a service on the cheaper side, but tonight I decide I am willing to pay a few extra bucks for privacy and order up a personal car.  The personal car comes directly to me and whisks me home.  It is still vastly cheaper than owning my own car, as the “personal” car promptly go finds someone else to ferry around once it is done with me, instead of sitting around rotting on the side of the street.

Which brings us to how these cars would have changed cities.  There are no longer any cars on the side of the street.  Cities are no longer giant parking lots.  When night falls, most autonomous cars disperse out into the burbs to be packed into large parking lots that double park all cars in.  Some stay in the city, but they too double park themselves into garages instead of polluting the streets.  When it gets near work time, they will slip out and move to likely spots to snag routs.  Fewer roads are used for traffic, and far more have become ped ways.

As a society, we consume vastly less fuel.  Almost everyone who isn’t in need of privacy “car pools”.  Hell, we might not even consume fuel at this point.  Waiting 8 hours for an electric car might be a pain if you own your own car, but if you use an autonomous car, when one car needs to charge, another rotates in to take its place.

So lets go over what a world of autonomous cars looks like:
1) Vastly cheaper transportation costs as you drop the 1 car for every person thing.
2) Vastly less fuel is used as you can set up a dynamic car pools with the press of a button.
3) Vastly less traffic as fewer people physically drive their cars AND there are fewer cars on the road to begin with.
4) Cities suddenly open up and become even more friendly to non-motorized transportation when we stop using them as giant parking lots.

So based on that, I have to wonder how easily fooled these cars would be by the fake tunnels painted on rockfaces by Wile E. Coyote.

I like it though, being my age having grown up in the 80′s where you saw movies of cars driving themselves and now we actually have cars that drive themselves is damn cool. Not many people will go through this experience…

Anyways, as long as there is a need to drive ahead and record stationary objects this will not work in the long run. This because streets change as objects come and go along the road sides.

The demo looks good, but until Google Maps can correctly figure out the numbered street system of Utah — where if you know the address, you know how to get there — accurately,  I wouldn’t trust it with my life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3fiAWcTSSs&feature=player_detailpage#t=190s

You know with out making a left turn off a bridge or something…