Even before self-driving cars, they should make "safe driving computer" that tracks your eyeballs and makes annoying beeps when you aren't looking at the road.

Then require those computers for any teenager that wants to drive, or for anyone after they get in an accident (car insurance company could say "install this device, or pay higher premiums.")

I'm ready for the all self-driving car future.

Will road rage end with self driving cars? Would be a nice advantage over the current situation.

Should have put "WARNING! SELF DRIVING CAR!" stickers all over it.

only they never should have attempted it in the first place. Fucker was unwilling to wait his turn to pass the slow vehicle and paid the price.

I want my self driving cars so we can finally end shit like this. Driving is not supposed to be a hard task....

you really don't save any significant time by making stupid moves like this. what does it take to get people to stop people doing shit like this?

In a few years time, self driving cars will make the most amazing car art projects possible.

They hate us for our insurance-rate-reducing, self-driving cars!!!

You will need insurance, but because the risk is so, so much lower the insurance will be almost nothing.

I'm in the UK and for my wife and I to insure our new VW Golf fully comp it costs £118 a year. That's very cheap for the UK. But it costs my apprentice at work about £1700 to insure a piece of shit old banger. The difference clearly isn't the value of the vehicle, mine is worth for than ten times his and his insurance is more than ten times mine.

The difference is that he's only just past his test and is young whereas I'm in my mid thirties and I've been driving for 17 years. The difference is in the likelihood of us having a crash and hurting someone.

Self driving cars will have the ability to react to a situation way, way faster than I ever could, and to be able to react together if there are lots of them on the road, meaning even if there is an accident the consequences will be massively reduced.

A self driving car will never be tired. It will never be distracted by a phone, or a passenger or anything. It will never be drunk.

All of these things mean that the risk from a self driving car will be way less than for a human driver. And by way less I mean a tiny fraction. The more self driving cars there are around the less risk there will be. Humans are an unpredictable element, remove them from the situation and you'll remove the risk massively. So, my risky apprentice is now a lower risk than I am, and as such his insurance will be lower than mine. All of a sudden the insurance company's income is slashed to a fraction of what it was.

Insurance companies make money out of risk. When everyone on the road becomes low risk they will make less money.

Cars will still have to be insured since accidents can still happen, but there will be many fewer accidents. Insurance companies will make shitloads of money because they won't be paying out nearly as much. It wouldn't surprise me to see them offer significant discounts to anyone with a self driving car.

People think of self-driving cars as something we'll have in the future. With systems like adaptive driver assist, they are pretty much already here. Hell some cars even steer for you. It'll take a generational shift before people are comfortable in cars they aren't driving but I suspect we'll be seeing automated vehicles in action before long, especially in commercial space. Once people realize just how much more safe they will be, it'll really catch on. Eventually the idea of a vehicular accident will be nearly unheard of.

This is a future that is already becoming a reality, and it will arrive with inexpensive electric vehicles driven by a competitive revolution started already by Elon Musk.

Traffic accidents would be virtually eliminated. The insurance industry probably has the most to lose when it comes to self driving cars, without a risk to insure against they can't make any money.

Regarding features like this, I've just got a new Golf with adaptive cruise control. This measures the distance between you and the car in front and maintains a pre set gap up to a set speed. They have a lane assist option too, like the video here but I don't have that and I'm really glad. The cruise control is teaching me to not react when a car slows down in front of me or pulls into the lane in front of me because the car is doing it for me.

I've noticed I'm letting my eyes wander for longer when looking at the radio, or flicking through options on the display. It's not intentional, taking my eyes off the road is dangerous. I know that. But I can steer between white lines using my peripheral vision so as long as nothing really bad happens the car will save me, so the temptation to look at something just a little longer creeps in subliminally. I don't want to be doing it, and I try not to. Thing is, if you're driving a long way it's pretty certain you're not going to have the self control to be 100% focussed on the road every millisecond.

I can't wait for driverless cars. I can't help but think that features like this being drip fed us are not really that helpful. It's just teaching us to pay less attention when actually the cars aren't that clever yet.

And to anyone who's going to say 'if you take your eyes off the road you're a bad driver, you should be able to keep concentrating, blah blah blah', you don't understand how the mind works. Your body adapts to the situation you're in. When I drive an auto I don't go for the clutch all the time, my body adjusts. It's not a conscious thing, it's automatic. it's the same with these driver aids, your body learns to take advantage of them.

A road system entirely populated by self-driving cars wouldn't need stop lights or speed limits. Intersections would just "Work" on a yield-to-demand basis. If you have 75% more vehicles going East-West than North South, the intersection timing would adjust to letting 3x as many cars through every switch one way than the other.

There's going to be an interesting transition period from self driving cars that must have a competent driver that can take over, to self driving cars that are legally autonomous (i.e. doesn't need human oversight).

The ultimate end IMHO, is roads that only allowing AI vehicles. Think about it, computers are much faster than humans. if you had a road where all the cars were networked, you could have high speed traffic with perfect reaction times and no human error. At that point, allowing a human driver would be dangerous.

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