After listening to Avi Rubin's Ted talk[0] and seeing articles like the Hacker's remotely kill jeep on Highway[1], I am less bullish on self-driving cars. Mobile and regular OSs are vulnerable to attack, except here your data as well as your safety is at risk. As well as making these cars orders of magnitude safer (in terms of navigation), they will need to be orders of magnitude harder to hack and take control of.

A few high profile hacks leading to crashes and fatalities will be enough to turn a large swathe of the population off autopilot technology, which they are already skeptical of.

[0]http://www.ted.com/talks/avi_rubin_all_your_devices_can_be_h... [1]http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-high...