[modernshoggoth]

Indeed. The whole self-driven car isn't a new idea - various individuals and university disciplines have been trying the idea for the last decade over in Europe - it's legal to test these ideas on the road in some countries over there.

If you make the assumption that all cars will be AI, then traffic-handling becomes very, very simple. It's not obstacles or accidents that cause serious problems for traffic, it's the fact that you can't know what all other drivers are thinking.

If all vehicles behaved to a certain rule set then all vehicles actions could be predicted, and as a result designing logic to accommodate that is made much easier.

[jeza]

That might work if the road system were entirely isolated from the rest of the world, but it's not. There are walkers, cyclists, animals, children and other random obstacles that might exist, none of which will ever be controlled by computers.

[darkxanthos]

The idea of all cars following the same set of rules even if they are all AI driven is actually way too complicated. Bugs and misunderstandings of the standard would cause deviations that the other cars would need to react to anyway.

[summerdown2]

> If all vehicles behaved to a certain rule set then all vehicles actions could be predicted.

... or, potentially, hacked.