I was just going to post this but forgot to login and here was your post. The hard part is the initial adoption when most cars are still manually driven and the good stuff comes when none of it is manually driven. How we get there will be and adventure.
The way we get there is through car sharing schemes like Zipcar and Getaround.
v1 Zipcars automatically move themselves around between designated spots to rebalance supply and demand
v2 Zipcar can come pick you up much like Uber << taxi industy is screwed at this point
v3 Zipcar can pick you up and then drives you to your destination << Zipcar becomes much more desirable than owning a car at this point
This will happen at first in big cities like NY or Sydney here in Australia where parking, registration and other costs make car sharing already popular.
That's the point. Like riding, directly operating a motor vehicle can be an enjoyable an rewarding experience without being a good way to get around town. Someday, I hope, driving will be reserved for purpose specific tracks, cars that are actually enjoyable to drive, and drivers who can afford to pay the unsubsidized cost of such a leisure activity. I like a good drive myself, but I'd rather let a computer handle drudgery like stop-and-go on a large freeway through LA twice a day.
Yup. I have a friend who trains horses for a living and another that really wants to get into that business. But her customers aren't average workaday people: they're people who are willing and capable of and interested in investing time and effort and money and space into cultivating their relationships with horses, who want to learn more about them and use them for very specific ends.
Already today a lot of people have no idea how the internals of cars really work, do not properly care for their vehicles, and ultimately couldn't care less if someone set up a teleporter instead. The vehicle isn't the point for most people. For the people for which it is the point, they're the ones who obsessively follow Top Gear, wish they could buy Ferraris even if they have to rebuild the engine constantly, happily tinker away under the hood on the weekend: they already do that to the extent that their finances allow.
Driverless cars take nothing away from them except traffic jams during commute.
This is different. This is a horse you ask nicely to take you there but once you're locked inside it can take you anywhere. The issue is not safety, it's control.
Horses have control issues as well. And a properly designed autonomous car is likely to have a manual override or emergency stop, things for which there are no good equivalents on a horse.
