The quip about the laws in the article is misguided, none of the laws so far have been about licensing self driving cars for everyday use, they have been to clarify the legality of putting test vehicles on public roads.
Self-driving cars are great example of cost cutting. It would take $ 100 000 000 000 to develop system which can actually drive. Google is using GPS with fraction of cost. But GPS signal is very weak, easy to block or even spoof. If self driven cars will become reality $20 gadget could collapse traffic in entire city for hours/days.
Your $20 evil genius GPS blocking gadget is far more likely to cause the regular human beings in their cars to lose track of where they are going than the robot that has been designed with this exact constraint taken into consideration.
Furthermore, as of right now and the near and mid-term future, it's not legal for the car to drive itself without a human at the wheel. Which means the self-driving car still has to function as a human-drivable car. The final nail in your mustache twirling GPS-blocking evildoer's coffin.
Before we go to a complete driverless system, it's likely we'll need lots more sensor assistance, such as "active highways" with mile marker and lane-keeping RFIDs paved into the roads, and other similar technologies. But we're probably at least 30 years off from even having that conversation given the conservative climate and the love for personal driving in this country.
Maps and dead reckoning fall more under navigation than they do driving and that part of the problem is reasonably solved.
I went on a road trip recently and I've been thinking about how advances in car technology change how we view cars. I came to a similar conclusion as Don - specifically the change from manual to automatic gearboxes has meant that people have to concentrate less on driving and can devote their attention to other things.
But that's not necessarily a good thing - by getting rid of the idea that driving is an activity that requires full-time attention we are making it more unsafe because people then feel justified in paying it less attention. The reductio ad absurdum argument is the self-driving cars that he mentions at the end of the article, but this is just the end of the spectrum.
I'm not sure what the solution to this problem is.