Apeless Carriage - A Hitchhiker's guide to Driverless Vehicles

One unique characteristic of autonomous vehicles is their potential to be safer than the mode they replace. Cars today are safer than ever, but their use still results in over 35,000 deaths a year in the U.S. alone. Safety systems are now becoming available with the potential to mitigate the results of driver error, and avoid some accidents entirely. Advanced safety systems - lane departure warnings, collisions alerts, even direct accident avoidance - are finding their way into an increasing number of luxury and even mid-price vehicles. At this point most of these features are optional and rely on consumers to value them highly enough to pay more.This is reminiscent of the of the early stages of the process that saw the adoption of  passive safety systems such as airbags and ABS. Consumer interest may lead to active safety features being adopted, perhaps more quickly than ABS and airbags, which had minimal adoption rates early in their introduction (even thou...

Change is coming .  Over the next 25 years driverless vehicles will begin to transform the way we live, work, and organize our urbanizing world. It derives from the revolutionary nature of new tools available to us,  and may provide us with a unique opportunity to re-balance the relationship between nature and technology. A Revolution, again . The transition to driverless vehicles will have recognizable similarities with past transitions in the ways we move ourselves, and our things, across the surface of the earth. Disruptive, comprehensive, and inexorable it is a process of change that began with walking and will continue to have profound and far-reaching effects. The combination of pre-existing technologies with more recent innovations are often at the heart of important changes in transportation . In this case one of the most productive technological lineages in human history, the wheel, is being combined with the emerging power of the computer. Not since the replac...