Keep in mind that AARP is excited about driverless cars because for millions of seniors, losing their ability to drive means losing their independence. Also, by age 50, everyone knows somebody killed by a human-driven car. AARP's members vote at very high rates even in non-presidential elections, so they are a very powerful lobby.

http://www.aarp.org/home-family/personal-technology/info-201...

There's also the psychological issues: elderly people don't want to be a 'burden' or rely on strangers, and autonomous cars neatly solve both issues.

There seems to be so much positive traction among political and industry players that this might turn out to be one of those rare technologies who's progress doesn't get crippled by vested incumbents. But experience has taught me to be cautiously optimistic at best.

It'll be "Cash for clunkers" redux. Much amplified is my guess. Human-driven cars will be ilegal on public roads in very short order.

The way cultural currents are going, there's a lot of room for companies to make marketing headway through "we are nicer" and "we are not douchebags" public images. (Hopefully, fairly accurate public images.)

I mean, when it's been years since Apple has been parodied with a "We're mad with power" tagline, and when public shaming has become a way of life online, it's about time for nice.

I'm not holding my breath, it'll be a looong time (decades, plural) before driver-less cars work everywhere, in poor weather conditions, in areas with lots of cyclists and pedestrians, in developing nations and parts of developed nations with bad roads, bad or unenforced traffic laws etc.. Human drivers will have a reduced role, but they won't be "obsolete" any time soon.

Driver-less cars likely means people taking more trips, causing more congestion and more pollution on the roads where they can actually operate. I wouldn't be surprised if some cities ban them.

But you are 100% right that congestion will be the problem. Cars simply do not scale well, as the amount of sqft/passenger/minute is huge. We seem to be unwilling to devote the huge amounts of land to highways that we would need to in order to make congestion go away. And in cities, intersections can only let so many vehicles through per minute.

As another commenter said, traffic is a good problem, however it's only good until it stops trips. It's great for people to be moving about, but when traffic prevents that, it's bad.

Autonomous drivers give people back their time in the car to do with as they please, but they will definitely increase congestion.

Depends. In St. Louis, for example, a fully electric vehicle produces the same pollution (via the power plant) as a 36mpg car [0]. That's about in line with a highly-rated compact like the Golf or Mazda3 these days.

Electric vehicles give us the capability to reduce emissions by building cleaner electrical infrastructure, but that does not mean we will do so.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe#Carbon_footp...

Additionally, pollution concentrations matter for cities, specifically dumping the exhaust out right next to people vs. dumping it at remote locations where it has more area to dilute before encountering people.

The long tail pipe hypothesis seems to be a bunch of people trying to desperately prove that electric cars are no better, but they have to resort to extreme cases to try to justify their positions. 36mpg which pollutants? Certainly not all them. CO2 from pure coal is something like a 50 mpg car. And as we get rid of these inferior and more expensive sources of electricity, electric cars will only increase their lead over gas vehicles.

And when there's a surplus of self-driving cars, where do they go?

There will be an increase in miles driven per passenger mile in order to get the self driving cars to where they need to be, when they need to be.

No one wants to own a single person car, because even a single person wants to be able to carry passengers if they need to. But lots of people will be making single person journeys all the time, so it makes sense for a taxi company to own them.

Until your kid gets asthma so people can have the privilege of spending 2 hours in a car commuting.

Not to mention making the roads less usable for everyone who isn't in a car.

At least the legal reasons are now moot at least in Germany, as all the laws required for self-driving cars have already been passed.

All the harbors and airports have been using fully automated vehicles for transport on their area for quite a while now, and the recent showcase where autonomous trucks from all european car manufacturers drove to the netherlands has shown reliability on streets as well.

At least in the transport market autonomous cars are less than half a decade out.

Google is invested in uber, why would they not supply them the data they needed?

From the VC side, Google Ventures invested ~$250M in Uber a few years ago.

How is it they're afraid of Google?

Isn't Google Ventures pretty isolated from Google?

Though what I do think will happen is an erosion of their lead where they go from the sole 800lb gorrilla in the west to being one of many with automakers coming into their own offering self driven taxi style service on what will probably be a subscription model (like how we have monthly payments for cars today).

Either this, or I could easily seeing aggregator apps, similar to the many that have popped up to manage multiple social media accounts, appearing to help drivers and riders manage both Uber and Lyft accounts.

You might already know that, but for everyone who doesn't live in a city where they're available... :)

GM also aquired Cruise which builds automated driving kits http://media.gm.com/media/us/en/gm/home.detail.html/content/...