The only hard part about that is avoiding cars coming at high speeds from behind. (Though usually these people will be used to slowing down and they actually have to slow down if the car in front of them is legitimately overtaking another one The main responsibility to keep everyone save lies with the fast driving car on the left lane and with cars changing lanes to insure that they are not blocking someone else. Since autonomous cars have no blind spot and should be quite good at estimating distance and speed, presumably better than humans, that should really not be an issue.)
It's not as though you have to drive fast. Most people actually don't drive super fast, they stick to 130 to 160 km/h. You will only occasionally encounter someone going way beyond that. Just because there's no limit doesn't mean people drive at speeds they are uncomfortable with … extended periods at 160 or beyond make me queasy and I tend to stick to 140 or so. That also gets better mileage.
And it's dynamic. Portions will switch from unlimited to limited speed based on weather, construction, or accidents far ahead, giving everyone time to slow down and merge away from a blocked lane.
And drivers actually follow the signs. As an American driver it's an amazing thing to see.
This doesn't matter at all to Google's cars. They are designed to ignore the speedlimit in favour of the real speed of traffic around it[1], as it has been proven to be far safer than slowing down. It's currently caped at 16km/h over but this is an arbitrary limit.
Yeah, it's a good one to think about. I imagine massive swings in traffic speed with a frequency of a few minutes as the cars get into various interesting feedback loops.
It's not as though you have to drive fast. Most people actually don't drive super fast, they stick to 130 to 160 km/h. You will only occasionally encounter someone going way beyond that. Just because there's no limit doesn't mean people drive at speeds they are uncomfortable with … extended periods at 160 or beyond make me queasy and I tend to stick to 140 or so. That also gets better mileage.