[jabelk]

I wonder whether they will first become available as a product that individual people can buy, or if Google will open some sort of service where you can sign up for a monthly "car plan" for X miles. Or maybe partner with a taxi company/Uber, where you pay per ride but the cars are driverless. I imagine all 3 models will be tried at some point, and it'll be interesting to watch their development and which one eventually dominates.

Also, commuting could be done so much more efficiently. Imagine a fleet of 1 person cars that pick you up in the morning, drop you off at a more central location (than your house), at which point you get on a higher capacity (driverless?) vehicle - bus or van maybe - for the trip into the city. And the bus unloads into another central area, with another bunch of small cars taking people to their offices. I'd use the bus if it never stopped, and that system would be almost as fast as driving yourself. Heck, it'd probably be much faster, because the hordes of people people sitting alone in their sedans would be consolidated and eliminate a lot of highway congestion. Not to mention cheaper, and better for the environment (less gas).

I haven't heard much about addressing the legal and regulatory issues driverless cars are going to have to overcome, does anyone have more information on that? Obviously something will have to be done for when the car wrecks or malfunctions and damages something.

[slyall]

I really think that self-driving buses will be common long before most cars are.

  * They cover the same routes day after day
  * They are already centrally owned by large companies or governments
  * Driver cost is a big reason you can't have 2 small buses running twice as often
    as a single big bus. Or why buses can't run longer hours.
  * You still have limited space on roads and you need to use PT to get the
    person density up. This will always be hard with just one person in
    each vehicle

[jacquesm]

I think the driver on the bus has more functions than just being a driver. He's also an authority figure and can provide assistance.

[papaf]

There have been self-driving trains for some time now (Nuremberg, London Docklands). There are more people to be responsible for on a train and I do not see why a bus would be a special case.

[leoedin]

The London docklands railway have a staff member on board who opens/closes the doors and starts the train moving. It's a less skilled (and therefore almost certainly cheaper) job than driving a train, but it's still a person onboard.

Apparently not all the trains in Nuremberg are staffed, so perhaps it does work? I suppose the train driver is often segregated from the passengers in a way which makes them almost absent anyway.

It will be interesting to see if completely unstaffed buses are adopted anywhere, and if that proves succesful. I'd imagine that security wise a staff member isn't really necessary during busy day time routes (but then conversely that's probably when they'd be the most cost effective and provide the highest utility).

[jacquesm]

Trainstations are somewhat controlled, bus-stops are not, they can be just about anywhere.

[masklinn]

Which is relevant to the difficulty of designing a self-driving bus, but says nothing about any driver responsibilities outside of driving.

[robryk]

Not really. In case of a problem on board a train (unrelated to train's motion; for example, a medical emergency or a rowdy passenger), the train can usually be met by someone at the next station. In case of a bus, much more often there is no one to meet it at the next bus stop.

[secabeen]

While I sort of like the idea, there's still going to be lots of traffic in and around those bus/van depots. We're also going still need storage near urban downtowns for all those 1-person cars that spend 95% of their day idle waiting for the 5pm rush.

[briggers]

In between peak times, these vehicles could do same-day goods delivery.

One pulls up outside your office/residence and a Boston Dynamics Cheetah leaps out with your package between it's teeth.

Or the car acts as a mothership for sidewalk to door airborne drones.

[reitzensteinm]

You could probably get a lot more density with a custom built car storage facility. No need to accommodate pedestrians, cars of different sizes, or random access.