Less Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles (self driving cars) are supposed to be arriving in about 2 years. There are safety concerns of course, as highlighted by the unfortunate death of a pedestrian in Arizona last week. But until legislation arrives their progress and roll out will continue unabated.

Safety features are of course critical to their deployment; it has been suggested that because so many accidents are caused by errors in human judgement, self driving cars will actually made the roads safer.

Ultimately that's likely to be true but in the phase in which self driving cars and human-driven cars coexist on the same roads, autonomous vehicles will need an over-abundance of safety devices to cope with unpredictable humans in their environment.

In time human driven cars may become rare enough that autonomous vehicles will be far more likley to be surrounded by other self driving cars then their traditional predecessors. Coordination between cars - a network of vehicles talking to one another - might then provide information about road and traffic conditions as well as the ability to 'flock' (as in for example, computer simulations of flying geese).   

At that point, autonomous vehicles may be a misnomer; while today's cars are tightly coupled to their drivers but autonomous from other cars on the road, self-driving cars will be autonomous from their occupants but closely coupled to other cars, road furniture and other highway features.