So far Google's self-driving cars have been designed to have the driver take over in certain situations. I wonder how that works without a steering wheel and pedals. Are the cars manually drivable at all?
As long as there's a manual override and a responsibility to use it, the car requires a capable driver paying attention all the time. It's an interesting beginning and it might improve safety but it doesn't fundamentally change things.
But without manual override, the car must be very reliably capable on its own. I suppose there might be a network connection and the ability to dispatch an Uber to pick you up whenever the car decides it is unable to proceed. But nobody will choose to use these cars if that scenario is remotely common. So announcing that this thing could ship in 2 years indicates to me that either Google's tech is doing way better than has been suggested in other recent press, or Google has started talking up vaporware to an unprecedented degree.
Or the car just takes a panorama and converts it to an aerial view and you simply drag your car where you want it to be and press Go.
I can see my kids now, "I remember when I was a kid, my mom/dad actually had to control the automobile. Archaic!"
Not too long ago my friend's son asked me why my phone was attached to the wall. He had only ever known cordless phones. I image cars will go a similar route.
I wonder if real life will play out the same way : will controlling a car the human way become an unacceptable risk, and how fast will this happen ? Because we're likely to see both effects play here : first, humans will become worse at controlling vehicles, and vehicles will become better at it, likely having superior senses and predictive ability. So there should come a point where humans become a risk.
So there will come a point where we get to choose between new policies and letting humans drive. If we had self-driving cars and we could eliminate speed limits on interstates entirely, in trade for not allowing human drivers at all, would we do it ?
I'm very glad that California has legislation in place to allow this already, and think it's going to pay off in spades to be a leader in this area. My bet is that insurance will be baked into the price of the first generation of cars (ie subsidized by the manufacturers), liability rates will be extremely low, and there will be an avalanche of consumer switching over a fairly short period of 10-20 years.
Still, the numbers are completely incomparable. Google's cars have always had a driver at the wheel, and we have no idea how many times a manual intervention has prevented an accident. Google's cars have also been driving in very limited conditions: they have not tried to drive in very bad weather, and they do not handle highway merges or difficult surface streets.
Finally, it isn't clear that "zero accidents" is completely correct. Google has said that their cars have been in accidents, but only while under manual control or while stopped at stoplights. But what does this really mean? Perhaps there was an accident caused by the self-driving car, where the human driver took control at the last minute. Or perhaps the car saw a yellow light up ahead, slammed on the brakes to stop, and was rear-ended by another car expecting them to go through. (Technically, the other car would be at fault in this situation, but it is still unsafe driving on Google's part.) There is no public information that lets us know the safety record of Google's self-driving cars.
"We’re planning to build about a hundred prototype vehicles, and later this summer, our safety drivers will start testing early versions of these vehicles that have manual controls."