The technology pundits are ignoring the human factor, giving up control, trusting your kid's lives to a computer, the same technology that crashes on the desktop, and on our smartphones. What happens when the first car has a BOSD and the backup human driver isn't paying any attention and the accident happens within seconds of the crash? These things will likely kill a bunch of people and will go the same way that the C-5 or the Segway did.
Maybe I'm too cynical, but until we have HA computers that exist outside of a datacenter, I doubt a proof-of-concept by Google will go anywhere in this or the next decade, let alone disrupt anything. The idealism and flying cars optimism is well placed and I'd love to see it happen, but the future nearly always takes much longer to happen than people predict...