Another benefit that people are forgetting is that these vehicles will communicate with each other.
So not only does your vehicle suddenly get 360° vision and microsecond reaction times, it gets the benefit of 100 other cars with 360° vision for 100's of yards all around it.
I'd bet once everyone has upgraded, you could spend all day dropping rocks off an overpass and never dent a single car.
Like some others have mentioned, I don't believe the government will ever have to outlaw manual driving. Lawyers and insurance premiums will ensure that only the wealthy or foolish will spend much time 'behind the wheel' as we know it currently.
Besides, who will want to drive for real when the virtua-sim machine in your basement provides you with a far more surrealistic experience?
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The only question is how to deal with liability at that point. Certainly Google engineers or car companies won't want to shoulder the liability for tens of millions of cars. I wonder if the sensible thing to do would be for the government to essentially declare accidents "no fault" and administer some sort of insurance that all drivers pay into.
Not a huge stretch. No Fault Government Insurance already exists in Manitoba.
This is sure an interesting topic. I can't see manual driving getting outlawed in our life time, but would governments allow roads with mixed autonomous and manually driven vehicles? I'd drive an autonomous car to work everyday if it significantly reduced insurance costs, but at the same time I'd like sports cars to stick around.
Either way, I'm sure there are challenges left. A lot of sensors have issues with rain, for example. I wonder if the Google car analyses digital video in real time, or if it just relies on lasers and other sensors. I don't see any other way it could detect red/green lights (since it was driven around Nevada, I assume it can do that), so I think it probably does.
I think there are some easy solutions to the weather issue. Not everything needs to be automated, the driver could always enter weather conditions into a computer manually before leaving.
The endgame of this that's even worse for car enthusiasts than autonomous driving is no more car ownership. You need to go to the mall, a car shows up at your house, takes you to the mall, and heads off to do its next task. Kind of like ZipCars crossed with taxis.
Edit: Also, while self-driving cars don't appeal to me for scenic drives, or daily city driving, I would sure love one for driving across Nebraska or the 2 hour trip to Chicago on the interstate.
I don't see why insurance would go up for people driven cars as self driven cars are introduced, the benefit of reduced accidents would be shared by all drivers, not just self driven cars. The danger in allowing some people to retain the ability to drive their own cars is the free rider problem, where people drivers share in the benefits but contribute nothing. Some posters in this thread have even declared that if a majority of cars were self-driven they would deliberately drive recklessly, ruining the gains made by self driven cars and discouraging some people from switching to them.
The self driven cars will be maximally beneficial when everyone gets on board, I have trouble seeing governments not doing anything about drivers who hold out and attempt to sabotage the group benefit.
If all cars were self-driven and, as a poster above pointed out, connected I imagine stop signs and lights and highway policemen would become mostly unnecessary.
I would be a little freaked out about letting it navigate newly constructed areas where google's database might not be up to date. Stoney Trail Bloodbath.
I wonder if it can get out of the way of emergency vehicles coming up from behind?
if this catches on, then i'm sure you'd start seeing new roads designed for these cars. put nanotechnology in some paint and create lane markings that the car could read. then even in winter conditions you could ensure that the cars always stay in their lane
Was talking about this with Mrs Rathji last night, and realized that if every car was self driven, there would be so many advantages. With adhoc networks of cars sitting on the road, they would know where traffic problems were and be able to adjust organically to maximize traffic efficiency. For example: Ivor Strong bridge is backed up badly one morning. All the cars on Deerfoot know this within seconds of arriving, or even better they know this before even leaving the house because it is their default route.
They then plan alternate routes, with the lowest cost routes being claimed by cars until those alternate routes expected cost equals that of the main route. Not every car goes the alternate route because they know that so many cars are already going that route, so it wouldn't be any faster.
Dynamically optimized traffic would further reduce accidents, probably increase fuel efficiency and reduce the time everyone would take to get to work. People would not hate their commute, so the city would expand so quickly that SebC ends up on the news, having climbed to the top of the new hospital and is taking out commuters coming onto Seton Road with his high power sniper rifle, fuelled by a lifetime of violent video games.
Mrs. Rathji then informed me that I am the biggest geek in the world and proceeded to tell me about baby poop for the rest of our trip.
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I wonder if there's a way to combine both manual driving and self-driving cars at first. At least to ease in the technology. Like some sort of predictive driving.
Cars already do this to some degree... automatic parking, smart cruise control, automatic breaking before you can react, there's a bunch of this kind of thing already.
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Originally Posted by Teh_Bandwagoner
Edit: Eventually it would be cool to get all the cars say in a city registered into a massive computer that could optimize all driving in a city, eliminating all congestion forever! But yeah then the only problem is the whole Skynet thing that was mentioned earlier lol.
Yup, that's what I'd be for, though I don't see it happening in my lifetime at least just because there's always people who love driving their cars themselves, and this kind of optimization seems to be an all or nothing kind of thing. Though I guess if the manual car was still capable of automatic drive and was instrumented it could be integrated into the system somewhat, but things like intersections with no lights with cars timed to whiz past each other wouldn't be doable with a manual car.
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Originally Posted by burnin_vernon
I would be concerned about the drivers who never do any maintenance on their vehicles. The radar/laser or whatever would likely require some kind of routine inspections. Many people don't take their car in for any kind of service whatsoever until the problem has escalated.
That's a really really good point. In Nevada where the worst thing you have to worry about is dust or bird poop it's one thing, when people won't brush off 5 feet of snow off their cars, that's something else.
There'd have to be robust diagnostics that keep track of sensors at least, and it might not even be viable in a climate like ours (water playing havoc with laser and radar type sensors).
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