I see autonomous technologies to enhance the driving experience. All of the automatic cabs and ubers will get a lot of the traffic of the road allowing me to drive with less traffic. The increased autonomous safety tech allows me to drive without fear of me or someone else damaging my car I worked so hard to pay for. Im not denying that there will be A LOT of people that will give up driving and never look back, because there will. Im just saying we are going to have to find a middle ground for the MANY people that will still want to drive. For the people that start looking at the math and say that we should ban humans for safety reasons will be met with an alternate solution. Have the autonomous tech still running in the background even when the human is still driving. Think about how our autonomous braking and lane keep work today, just put them both on steroids and there is your solution. If braking uses the same radar as a fully autonomous car does, it could brake to avoid anything a self driving car would, combine that with fully automatic active avoidance and the safety level just skyrocketed. If we have an active lane keep assist that prevents you from changing lanes or going off the road when its not safe, combined with the braking, we could achieve the level of safety that some people are looking for while achieving a middle ground. I have another way to put it and it uses what elon said. He said that starting soon when all teslas will be equipped with fully self driving hardware, the computer will be in the background seeing when it could have intervened to prevent a accident but it won't intervene. Just in the future make it so it does intervene, just a subtle way (unless needed in a dramatic way) so it does not become annoying. If you want to force everyone to be in self driving mode to clear traffic or during rush hour, that could be done as well.
A lot of people have said with the new autonomous tech, we could allow cars to drive much faster that we do now. If the cars are just as safe in manual driving mode as is self driving mode (using the method above) then there you go, you can drive like you used to want to when you were young. At high speeds and it could be allowed! But maybe when there is below a certain amount of traffic, we will have to wait and see.
I think some day all cars will be required to have fully autonomous tech in them so that can at least do the things above that I listed. Some people that love to drive will, at times, not want to and then they can just flip a switch and let the computer drive. (ill do it sometimes, im not denying it) But there will always be many people for various reasons, that will want to have an "off" switch (even if its not completely off like I said) when they want. I think we need self driving cars. People that can't drive or can't own a car. People that live in very crowded cities where its just dumb to own a car. It would be much cheaper that an uber (looking forward to that). But I still want to drive when I want, so I want both options.
