This is a topic that is going to come up very soon; it's going to be too late to think about driver-less cars calmly and rationally, when our hot-tempered friends and colleagues get all hot and bothered about the subject! Many of our problems have stemmed from trying to make decisions when we're not ready, or when we don't have all the information.
Terminology
We should first get our terminology straight. One outfit that is working to smooth the way to getting ordinary car-owners and citizens using the same language is SAE, the Society of Automotive Engineers, the same fellows who set the specifications ('specs') for engine oil. They have defined five levels of car automation. (It's inconvenient that the word 'automobile' has the root 'auto' in it; we do not think of cars as auto-anything; when we used to talk about an automatic car, it meant an automatic transmission, which is not even considered much of an automatic thing anymore.)
Levels of Driving Automation (see here)
Level 0: No automation. The driver is fully responsible for most aspects of driving, even it the car may give warnings, etc. Some cars may briefly take control, e.g. when a crash is imminent, in very specific situations, as when you're following a vehicle too closely, and it suddenly slows; this is still Level 0.
Level 1: Hands On; the driver and the automated system share control. The system can do the steering, for example, in automatic parking; or changing lanes on an open highway, or stay in lane on a highway; or the system can control speed, such as in cruise control.
Level 2: Hands Off; the driver need not have his or her hands on the wheel, but must be seated in the driving seat, and be ready to grab the wheel whenever needed. In some cases, the car will insist on hands being on the wheel, even if not steering.
Level 3: Eyes Off; the driver need not be watching the road, but must be in the driving seat. The car will take care of some, but not all, emergency procedures; the driver must be ready to take over for the rest.
Level 4: Mind Off. The car will drive automatically, and if it sees a problem that is beyond its capability, it will wait for a set time, and if the driver doesn't intervene, it will park the car and close down. It is understood that this level of automation will only be allowed in certain safe areas, e.g. bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Level 5: Steering Wheel Optional, Fully automatic.
How I feel about all this
Safety There is no doubt that, once the systems are close to perfection (or perfected, something that some people will argue about, but perfection is never really achieved, as we all know), a group of Level 5 cars, all communicating with each other, are far less likely to result in a collision than if even one of them is being driven by a person. That day will come only if the crazy city traffic conditions are completely fenced-off from the 'automation-allowed' traffic zones. If all traffic is automated, then I suppose Level 5 cars can manage pretty well. This situation is hard to imagine; I would expect that cities will have most people on public transport, except for extremely ill, or extremely immobile (e.g. ultra-heavy, or handicapped) citizens who may have some special arrangement to avoid having to transfer from one vehicles into another. Having a car for each person even ten years from now will be a traffic nightmare, unless the 'vehicle' is just a little capsule, and not a full SUV.
Fun Anyhow, we have all been accustomed to think of driving as something fun to do--when the conditions are right--rather than a drudgery, a necessary evil to get from here to there. Unfortunately, that attitude simply means that we guzzle a lot of gas, and create a lot of pollution (considering CO2, which is a non-poisonous gas, as a pollutant, from the point of view of the greenhouse effect).
Pollution In addition, large tractor-trailers, which support our maniacal consumption habit, also generate a lot of pollution, and are often at the center of spectacular pileups on the highways, and spills. Level 5 trucks are a great idea. Those who earn their living driving trucks--poor souls--would hate the idea of being laid off, naturally. But from the point of view of the owners of the fleets, a truck, even going at a slow speed under an automatic system, can get goods to their destination just as fast as a human-driven truck, because it can just keep going without stopping. They will be much less of a danger to private traffic, because of the lower speed, and the predictability of the movements of an automatic vehicle.
To make this work better, they could make on-ramps for cars onto the second lane, so that cars can shoot over the stream of automatic trucks trundling along at 50 mph. Even if these ramps are fairly rare, it will make the whole thing more palatable for temperamental motorists. Notice how much like the railway the truck picture is becoming? Well, we might be stupid, but let's not be permanently stupid.
How Do They Do It?
Cars with a high level of automation combine a lot of inputs into what they decide to do. The automatic transmission, which was essentially perfected by Chrysler and Toyota (don't quote me; I did not look that up for the purpose of this post) uses the car speed and the engine speed, the load on the engine, and almost nothing else. This is why it is so amazingly effective; the transmission is flexible to start with (non-rigid), so over transmissions have become almost impossible to notice. (This is why we get pissed off if the transmission even falters slightly.)
Level 5 cars use a lot of inputs; potentially:
Input from cameras on board, to detect vehicles, obstacles, road information, and pedestrians.
Input from radar- or sonar- scanners aimed around the car, to prevent collision.
Eventually, radio communication with neighboring vehicles, to be able to predict future positions and configurations, and to calculate best motion decisions.
On-board, or off-board, maps or guidance systems.
Eventually, roadside guidance markers, such as markers embedded in the roadway, or on the roadside, or both.
Clearly, Level 5 vehicles will do a lot better if the cars that surround them are also Level 5.
But because we can anticipate that most drivers will stubbornly refuse to let go of the steering wheel, figuratively, these developments will have to be phased in slowly, until such time as this generation of drivers all die off.
In crowded situations (or all situations, really), a car has to keep track of four neighboring vehicles. It should be possible to program the system to deal with one or two vehicles that are missing the equipment to communicate the information that the automatic system would like, in which case, it could give a warning squawk, and hand the steering over to the driver. (In that sort of traffic, most of us would prefer to have our hands on, anyway.) In totally bumper-to-bumper traffic, the Level 5 system would do well, keeping a prescribed distance away from neighboring vehicles--front and sides, anyway; nothing can be done about the back--unless some neighboring joker wants to keep changing lanes all the time, as they seem to want to do on the New Jersey Turnpike, which is maintained for the entertainment of NJ motorists, rather than for traveling.
One Last Idea
The easiest plan to implement would be to set aside a couple of lanes only for Level 5 cars. This idea will work just about as well as the idea of the High Occupancy Vehicle lane (HOV lane) works, which is: just average; there are always renegades who want to get into that HOV lane and cruise, all by themselves. It is this omnipresence of renegades in the US that makes certain types of progress very difficult and slow. Unfortunately, the law and the courts seem to be on the side of the renegades! Oh well, the price we pay to live in freedom.
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