The Golden Age of Self-Driving Cars, Part 3

The parking lot at a supermarket in Punta Gorda FL is less than 30% full. Image from Google Maps

This is my last post for now on self-driving (aka autonomous) vehicles. My main point in this series has been that, in the short term, the best bet for self-driving vehicles is on interstate highways. You’ll have to drive your car to the closest on-ramp and you’ll have to take over again when you come to your exit, but the rest of the trip will be self-driving. We’re just about there now with driving-assisted vehicles that slow down, stop, or speed up based on the vehicle in front of you while they keep you within your lane.

Self-driving vehicles mean we could travel at night in a van and sleep while we drive the 11-hours on the Interstate from Chicago to Atlanta –‘Sleeper Cars.’

Driving in a city or suburb is another matter entirely. There are all the tricky parts about how a vehicle navigates through a city with a trash can in the road, gets around an accident, comes to an intersection where the traffic light is out, or there’s a cop waving at you to stop, or pedestrians and bikes are darting out between parked cars, vehicles double-parked, somebody coming at you the wrong way down a one-way street.

Do we need another paragraph of problems? Will a self-driving car be able to identify a ball rolling across the street from a lawn and know that there will be a kid running after it? Will it know to hit the brakes for a…