I'll first state my opinion that I too believe that (to use a different cliche) self-driving cars will be transformative. That being said, I just don't think t

I'll first state my opinion that I too believe that (to use a different cliche) self-driving cars will be transformative. That being said, I just don't think they're as close as many think. What is coming and will continue coming is assisted driving. These cars will be designed for human drivers but the car will just do more of the driving. This will have an incremental increase in safety. I imagine too that bugs will cause deaths and even though this will pale in comparison to the number of motor vehicle deaths we have now, alarmist concerns will stymy automation here. The holy grail here however isn't assisted driving. It's self-driving and you shouldn't confuse the two. A self-driving car in my mind will not be designed to be driven by a human at all. There is a lot of low hanging fruit for this but the low hanging fruit isn't that low and there is a long tail of situations a car will need to deal with. I actually wonder if we can design a self driving car without first creating what I can only describe as a "general AI". Anticipating what the other meat bags will do is a huge part of this. Once this happens (and, again, I think we're talking a long time still) I don't see private ownership of vehicles going away. People like to own things. What you'll see is car ownership disappear in highly urbanized places helped I'm sure by punitive taxing of car ownership ("punitive" here means not subsidizing car ownership like we do now). I suspect such cars will allow people to live even further from cities when you can work in your car. More people doing it still means a lot of cars on the road. Self-driving cars just aren't the end of private car ownership. If anything they'll likely be a death blow to taxis. It might be a huge problem for mass transit too.