[webscaleizfun]

That will just clog roads more, doesn't matter how much you mechanize it. Self driving cars will induce massive amounts of demand piled atop the latent demand that already exists for driving on nearly every arterial and freeway in cities, and even if everything was perfect, with cars driving at an optimal 45mph with minimal stopping distance, you can only move 2200 cars an hour per lane [1] and that scales non-linearly, as you add lanes to highways and arterial streets, throughput drops exponentially due to lane switching.

Now, self driving cars could get us closer to that 2200 cars an hour figure, but there is so much pent up demand for a magical faster option (latent demand) that when those marginal efficiency gains occur, there will be a flood of new vehicular traffic on the roads that will fully negate said efficiency gains, and likely exacerbate said issues since the tolerance for time spent in traffic will significantly increase for autonomous vehicle owners due to being able to do another task while your car drives for you.

[1] - http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hpmsmanl/appn2.cfm

[tlrobinson]

Indeed, that's the point I was hinting at: self-driving cars have the potential to increase carbon emissions, even the electric ones, due to increased usage and congestion.

Has Elon Musk publicly addressed this issue at all?

Self-driving cars are inevitable, so they may as well be electric. But if Tesla pulls the industry into the self-driving age before the majority of cars are electric they could actually be doing more harm than good. Perhaps self-driving cars should be required to be electric.

[cben]

If we'll use them as "self-driving taxis" more than personal cars — if you're not attached to a specific "your" car — some nice things might start happening:

(1) multi-modal mass transit/car mixing becomes more attractive.

(2) transit can optimize for high-frequency mini/microbus formats rather than least-number-of-employed-drivers. this is less optimal from road-occupation POV but can be a win if it makes more people actually use transit?

(3) required parking space drastically decreases. Reaping the benefits will take a LONG time, but we'll be able to go back to denser cities?