Don't worry, I don't want to pry the steering wheel from your cold, dead hands. Brad Templeton (the writer of the essays I linked to) predicts that robocars sho

Don't worry, I don't want to pry the steering wheel from your cold, dead hands. Brad Templeton (the writer of the essays I linked to) predicts that robocars should be able to co-exist with human drivers (though there would be some advantages if all cars had autonomous capability, such as increasing road capacity by reducing follow distance, and optimizing the design of parking garages). My interest is primarily on reducing deaths. I'm fortunate enough that I've never lost a close friend in a car accident, but two friends of mine have been injured (one moderately, one seriously), a close friend of mine lost his best friend, and the 21-year-old receptionist at my previous employment was killed in a head-on collision. I expect most people have stories like these or worse. The 93% figure comes from Wikipedia, and the citation is a report that doesn't define human error. Templeton thinks that robocars could eliminate almost all of the million car accident deaths per year. But even if it's only 50%, that would prevent so much avoidable loss. Templeton: "The creators will need to make an urban test track and fill it with swarms of the robots, and demonstrate that they can walk out into the swarm with no danger. Indeed, like a school of fish, it should be close to impossible to touch one even if you try. Likewise, skeptics should be able to get onto bicycles, motorcycles, cars and hummers and drive right through the schools of robots, unable to hit one if they try. After doing that for half an hour and getting tired, doubters will be ready to accept them on the roads." If that can be achieved, robocars will drastically reduce deaths.