I was talking to my wife about this a few days ago. I strongly believe that most cars sold in 20 years will have a driverless option. And it will be used - a LOT.
It reminds me of the analog and digital speedometers on my car. I’ve always thought digital was dumb and preferred the nice dial of analog. But I’ve owned my car for three months now and I rarely view the analog speedo. Same thing will happen with these cars. Give it 15 years and I’ll bet most cars will be driven by computer. In 20, it will be the norm.
And though people will have the option to drive themselves, most people will be like me with my analog speedometer. I force myself to look at it, just so I feel it should be there.
This will be the last step before we go to cars that you CAN’T drive. The love affair with the manually driven car really will go away, but it had a pretty long run.
The potential upside that I see to this is that it will give seniors who ordinarily wouldn’t be able to drive some mobility.
On a side note, I got third gear acceleration tire chirp in my Scion FRS on my way home from work last night. Kinda surprised me. It was oddly satisfying. :-)
I think by that point it will not be an option, but a requirement. In fact, I think the driver option will have been eliminated long before then.
I wonder how you would drive a vehicle across an area that was not a mapped road? For instance private property like big ranches, national forests etc...
Seems the government can also have control over your car like in the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report and basically drive you where ever they want you to go.
I thought of this last night, our society is in a push to “tech-up everything” in the name of cutting labor costs and making less human error. The down side I see to this is that over half of our population is too stupid to make the jump to the “panacea futuristic” world we sometimes see on tv where every one is released from manual labor to pursue higher callings and the world is all good. That leaves technology taking the jobs away from people who will never rise above the labor type jobs (some may not want to ex: real cowboys) and thus causing even more disparity in the classes. Will that tipping point come and cause those to get on board, get weeded out, or rebel? I am thinking #3.