So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention.
Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents
You are suggesting human's will run into it more often right? I sincerely doubt we will see too many autonomous-car-at-fault crashes. The blacked out Lexus SUV's I saw at a Google event a few weeks ago were very discrete minus the velodyne sensor. If it adds an credibility I was on a team at the Victorville final in 2007. :)
As an aside, I've been waiting to buy my Google car for 5 long years. During this time I've become so disenfranchised with day to day driving that I avoid it at all costs. Commuting via roads in a car is such a mundane task that is, in my opinion, a solved problem. Bring on the autonomous cars!
Commuting does kind of suck if you're trying to roll in during rush hour. But without super-heavy traffic I find driving to be rather enjoyable in itself. Even more so if you're riding a motorcycle :) Perhaps the problem is not commuting, but the fact that many companies want their employees at work at 9:00 and out of work at 5:00?
The problem for me isn't commuting, it's having to invest so much money into a huge pile of metal and plastic that someone distracted by someone or something in their own pile of metal and plastic can destroy in an instance, possibly killing me and anyone with me. Or maybe I get distracted and the result is similar.
I just don't see the few cases where it's enjoyable to be worth the other costs. I'd consider it similar to smoking in that regard.
Feel free to refrain from driving, in that case; just don't get in the way (in a legal sense) of those who still want to.
Smoking is a much greater nuisance than driving, because a nearby smoker will foul the air for a fairly large radius through no choice of the people around them. Driving only affects other people who choose to be on the road.
Comparing to smoking seems to be a huge stretch to me. One thing virtually guarantees cancer and an eventual unpleasant death while providing no measurable benefits at all, and the other allows you to easily travel all over the place cheaply with a relatively small chance of a major accident.
That's not true at all, the incidence rate of lung cancer in smokers is less than 20%. That's still much higher than for non-smokers (0.4% - 2%), but hardly a "virtual guarantee".
My wife sees a neurosurgeon who's an eight hour round trip away. I've driven her there and back at least six times this year.
With a Google car, I'd a) be able to send her by herself and b) even if I had to come, I could work on the way, meaning I'd have more than a week's worth of vacation/sick time restored.
You could also hire a limo. I suppose in the future you'll be able to rent a google car for a day, but you don't have to wait for self-driving cars. They're here today, the self just happens to be a human.
I think $10,000 is a big over-estimate, but even that would be spread out over the life of the car. I'd happily pay $1000 a year to not have to worry about driving.
Hopefully I'll be wearing my google glass too! So, I guess so.
True privacy is very hard. You could set up a camera to read plates at some choice points and know the whereabouts of most of the people in your city. If you want to do something privately you have to act deliberately in this day and age.
To set up such cameras, you'd need permission from our National Data Protection Commission and if you were to store footage with car plates you'd fall under the Personal Data Protection Law which requires you to either get explicit consent or fall under one of the few exceptions in the law (and no, tracking random people isn't one of them).
And even if you qualify, you can only use that data for the specific purpose you said you needed it for and it needs to be well protected (for example, a governmental CCTV installation was suspended because the recording weren't being well encrypted).
The car is pretty eye catching: http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/p...
So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention.
Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents