If the car were invented today...

It would be a hybrid tram/car, they would have to follow a track but that track wouldn't be electrified fully it would be a guide for where they can go, just at stops and parking is where the car could charge. the cars would have an urban and rural mode. rural would work without those tracks.

I don't know a lot about car to suggest changes to wheels and engines - that line of thing.

Automating cars... well, that's a relatively hard problem to do wholesale.

I suspect the first thing I'd look into would be simplifying.

Lane changing is stressful, people tailgating is stressful, parking can be difficult.

Lane keeping isn't as hard a problem as automating the entire drive. And it doesn't seem like it should be hard to link that up to something that says move one lane over. And from there to check if a space in the next lane is clear - iterate that until it is and then move over.

Replace the steering wheel with a clicky joystick. Set it up so that when someone's near a parking space and they move the joystick towards it the car parks in that space.

Keeping distance isn't hard, but a lot of people don't do it. It's not hard in a mathematical sense either. Replace the gearstick and so on with a slider with a desired speed setting. Approximate that speed as closely as possible while maintaining a decent distance from the car in front.

And, incase the software went squify, a big red button that would stop the car via some non-software set-up.

You can probably break it down into many more sub-points. This is like a five minute 'if I', after all. But, I suspect that sort of thing would remove a lot of the day to day aggravation of driving. You'd be indicating your intent to the car, doing the planning, but the car would be doing the stressful implementation details.

And as computer vision, general automation, got better you could start to do things like automatically moving out around junctions to maintain a smooth flow of traffic, executing better zipper merges - and so on. So that there wouldn't be that hard line between the driver being in control of the car and the computer being responsible. Each iteration would just require the person to touch the controls less, until they didn't have to touch them at all.