[neals]

Coming from Europe, I can see self driving cars work in the USA, your roads are just so big and... well "easy" to navigate. Now come to Europe. Narrow winding roads, no grid system in cities, lots one way traffic, uneven 'brick' roads, blocked often by wrongly parked cars, thousands of bicycles.

I have a hard time navigating here myself. A lot has to change before the automatons take of the streets :(

[Vivtek]

And yet the Magyar Tudományos Akadémia (Hungarian Scientific Academy) is doing exactly this kind of research in self-driving cars, in Budapest. Self-driving cars could ultimately be far safer than human drivers in adverse situations, especially since a self-driving car will never be surprised by a one-way street.

[jebus989]

Well road testing starts January 2015 in the UK, and in Gothenburg from 2017 [0], presumably many other European countries have similar plans so we'll see!

[0] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28551069

[untog]

But Europe has comparatively strong public transit. So at least there's that.

[undersuit]

> roads, blocked often by wrongly parked cars

How do humans deal with it, can they upload a notice to all the other human driven cars that the road is blocked?

Also if the wrongly parked car is self driving, the blocked car can just ask for permission to pass and the wrongly parked car makes way and then comes back to the original position... that is if the wrongly parked car didn't send a preemptive signal to all the other cars in the area that it would be blocking traffic.

[1ris]

I think in densely populated parts of Asia it's even harder.