Preface: my primary modes of transportation (in my city) are walking, biking, and subway. God, I cannot wait for either hyper loop or self driving cars (I'm su

Preface: my primary modes of transportation (in my city) are walking, biking, and subway. God, I cannot wait for either hyper loop or self driving cars (I'm sure we'll see the latter first). I live in Northern California and have family in Southern California. We're starting to flip the holidays this year (wife's family for thanksgiving, mine for Xmas). Just went down to LA for a friends wedding and the drive was horrendous. A lot of factors come into play: 1, as much as I've hated them in the past, a big suv (especially with a kid) is the way to go. We have a VW Passat (wife's) and it was so crammed it was ridiculous. Very uncomfortable and it's not even a compact. 2, I'm over 40 now and it just physically hurts to drive for 7 hours. I was totally sore the next day. Frickin sucked. 3, Directions. I totally need navigation now. Even with the turn by turn on my phone, I still made wrong turns. 4, I hate driving. Hate it. I see it as such a waste of time. I can't imagine needing to drive to make a living. In my late teens and early 20's when I lived in Southern California, I hade to do just that. After I moved to the city I vowed I never would again. 5, Other drivers. I was pretty appalled by some of the drivers on the road. I kept thinking, I can't wait for computers to handle this so that guy driving down the emergency lane wouldn't be able to. If I could just hop in a driverless car for that drive, it would be great. I could nap, read, compute, converse, etc. Things I can't do now. I'm sure there's going to be some resistance at first by those with a 'god given right' to drive. But after a while, I see common sense prevailing. I listened to a great talk at The Long Now Foundation by Tim O'Reilly. He was talking about driverless cars and how the DARPA car challenge when it started could only do around 7 miles. It wasn't the algorithms that got that much better (although I'm sure they did) for the Google cars, it was the data set. Google Maps was a huge advantage and the 'killer app' for the latest generation of their cars. So a lot to look forward to in this arena. I think my kid will grow up with the internal combustion car for him being like the 8-track for me.