I think when cars themselves came about, speeds of 10mph were considered breakneck and dangerous. I remember reading an old crash report where the author claimed that the driver must have been going at least 10mph and thought it was lucky nobody was hurt.

I guess to gain the trust of the public and politicians, self-driving cars must go through a similar process. I have met people who have said self-driving cars will never take off, never match the skill of a well trained manual driver and that they dont trust them. I guess it's slightly biased in that they have been driving for many years, one was my driving instructor and all are not considered technologists.

I'm looking forward to the experience, personally. I do, however, enjoy driving :)

Early cars also had wooden wheels, no tyres (well, strips of rubber, but no air), and no suspension to speak of. Going 10mph in one of them probably would've felt like 50mph in a modern car!

People would have had experience travelling at speed because of trains. Even horses can travel faster than that. I do remember reading about the first train and there was worry that people couldn't survive at speeds greater than 25 mph.

I wonder whether this might be a category with long-term viability in certain city environments - light, small, padded cars that travel at 15-25 mph would be able to mix in a much more natural way with pedestrians and bikes than traditional road vehicles.

I'm reminded of those Dutch-style shared space schemes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhibition_Road

I think, too, that there's a logical disconnect between "we focused on learning, not luxury", and "we want to hear about what you want in a vehicle where you sit back and enjoy the ride" (probably, to most, -not- a dearth of comforts).

As long as it's safe (duh) and moderately comfortable, I'd be just as happy to read or suchlike. Chances are these cars have good internet connectivity as they're probably going to be used in cities and you can stick an arbitrarily large antenna into the car body, so work, gaming or video consumption are practical too (on your tablet or other personal device). what else do you need - a cup holder and easy-to-clean interior?

Think of this as a bike-commute substitute with a roof.

An interesting thought. How small can self-driving vehicles be? Would you ride a self-driving motorcycle? A self-driving wheelchair? How about a self-driving Segway? You get on, hold on, and it does the rest. The technology for getting this working at all (let alone safely) is a long way away, but perhaps it could happen.

Without the exercise capability.

You could remove the seats and install an exercise bike.

that's a terrible analogy :) ! more like a taxi without having to speak to the driver or a personal bus.

If only my bike powers and steers itself

Lets be clear here. The aim here is to let you sit back, browse the web, and click on Google ads.

this meme of everything google has to relate back to ads is wrong and needs to be retired. They already have non-ad revenues above $1B/year. They are clearly investing in non-ad businesses across the board.

It's because of the 55B they made last year, more than 50 of it was from advertising. I'm sure Coca-Cola is more than a soft drink company, but that's the main thing. The only real threat to google is a threat to their ad revenue. So, it makes sense to think of google in terms of ad sales.

That's very handy when you're building a bunch of barebones prototypes. Clever Google!