[JoeAltmaier]

Nobody suggests driverless cars are working open-loop from GPS coordinates; no current driverless cars work that way. Its generally a combination of gps, local sensors including sonar, radar and cameras, and car-to-car networks. The UofIowa Driving Simulator has done studies of trains of cars linked by short-range networks, where they coordinate braking and acceleration to achieve inter-car distances of a few feet.

[jordanpg]

Sure, in principle; my point is that even the best networks fail way too much for this to be practical. In the context of this particular thread, I'm saying that implementing driverless cars even in a narrow context is a non-trivial infrastructure upgrade, whatever form it takes. These networks will need to have reliabilities and uptimes on par with medical or nuclear safety systems.

[cliffbean]

We don't need any networks. Self driving cars will always need to be able to share the road with normal cars. That mechanism will support the case of sharing the road with other self driving cars too. Networks can add fancy features, but they can happen on their own time, incrementally.