[Evolved]

If Google's 25mph car is able to slam on the brakes and avoid an incident without swerving or taking other action then it could be argued that once we move to a fully autonomous society, 25mph (example; may not be accurate but for the sake of debate, 25mph is what I'll stick with for this scenario) may end up being the max speed for safety reasons.

This isn't to say that now trips will take longer and that will adversely impact our lives because I think what will end up happening is we will rearrange our lives so that we use these longer driving trips to sleep or work, converse with friends, do homework on the way to class, etc. and thus the time it takes to get from point A to point B becomes moot as we are now able to be orders of magnitude more productive in our vehicles.

Granted, this will not only reduce accidents as now the vehicles can communicate with each other and will instead know what the intentions of the other car are and adjust accordingly instead of trying to anticipate what the other car is going to do, but it will also reduce or eliminate speeding tickets and DUIs. Due to speeding tickets and DUIs being a large source of revenue for municipalities, I'd expect this to evolve as well, unfortunately.