[alexhawdon]

I suspect this is simply one of many self-driving car patents Google will file, but it's fun to speculate:

Technological hurdles aside, the catch-22 situation is that without much evidence the technology works there will never be public acceptance and legislation for it to be used on the roads. Perhaps Google plan to initially market the system as some sort of beefed-up parking assist - one where you leave your car at the entrance to a car park and collect it from there later. I'm not lawyer, but car parks != public roads, so different laws should apply.

Obviously, nobody would pay loads of extra cash just for that feature, but maybe Google would be willing to subsidise it in the hope that it gets them over the public-acceptance hurdle as people would start getting used to cars driving themselves around without incident and start to trust the technology. It would also build up thousands of hours of evidence of the safety of the system, which the legislators are going to want to see before they okay it for general driving.

Personally, I can't wait until self-driving cars are a reality. It's going to revolutionise transport. :)

[JanezStupar]

Probably autopilots will be sold and marketed as glorified cruise control. To be used only with a driver behind the wheel. And then they will gradually get accepted to the scale that it will be silly not to have a full permit for autonomous vehicles.

[alexhawdon]

Possibly. Though they'd either have to build in something to monitor the driver or accept that they're just going to tune out and read the paper/go to sleep.

Could be a potential way to bring it to market that keeps the insurers happy though. Make the driver 'promise' to pay attention and should an accident happen and the driver didn't take over then the insurer doesn't pay.