I mean standard transmissions are almost non-existent in passenger vehicles now, people just want to plop it in D for dull and continue with their texting.

I would imagine the insurance industry will have more to do with how long manually driven vehicles will stick around.

If insurance is considerably more for a vehicle with a steering wheel, most people will ditch the steering wheel and vehicles will start to resemble living rooms. How quickly really just depends on how steep an increase it is.

Sad, but that does make sense thanks @funkdaddy .
They probably will be a lot better for drive by shootings as well, nobody will have to worry about driving they all can just man the guns.

@SQUEEKY2 Of course police would then be able to do a reverse GPS search and locate all vehicles on the street where the shooting occurred, the current whereabouts of those vehicles and view the camera feeds to confirm the shooters’ identities.

I think we have a while yet (maybe ~2 decades?) before the days of the manually driven vehicle go away. I’m sure there will probably be manually driven race cars and such by enthusiasts for a long time, just as there are still horse shows/races long after the horse and buggy was phased out.

In the end, self-driving vehicles will be several orders of magnitude safer than human drivers. Everyone will be annoyed by “human drivers” just like people get annoyed when they have to wait for an opportunity to pass an Amish dude driving a horse and buggy.

Of course all of this presumes that the robots don’t take over. We may end up driving them around for their own amusement…

@gorillapaws Or cyclists, or motorcycles, or scooters. Many people really can’t drive well.

Well I hope I still have the option of a manually driven vehicle until I am too old to drive then maybe and autonomous one will fit the bill but only then.
I have seen wonder tech, fail time and time again when it comes to transport trucks, our trucks are in the shop way more because some fucking sensor started acting up, rather than a mechanical failure.
Hopefully I will be long gone before we become so fucking dumb we can’t wipe our own ass without the help of some wonder gadget.

@SQUEEKY2 – For how often you’re angry at other drivers I really thought you’d be all for taking the wheel out of a lot of people’s hands.

I think and hope that there will still always be human-driven vehicles.

I also think the possibility of not having human-driven vehicles is much farther away than most people think. I think there will be more and more problems the more robot-driven vehicles are on the roads.

I both don’t “want to just sit there” and also am very concerned about robot cars being on the roads.

As someone who has programmed expert systems and AI and simulations of dangerous situations, I think most people are way off-base in their assumptions that robot cars are going to be less dangerous than human drivers. I think the dangers will just be different kinds of danger. In general I much prefer the known range of human mistakes to the unknown stuff that could happen when something goes wrong with who knows what inside a robot car or its logic.

It would be a safer, more advantageous method of commuting. Imagine no stop/traffic lights/signs, no traffic jams, no accidents. Imagine reading the paper and drinking your morning coffee while being whisked to work. People could spend the entire trip on their phones and no one would care.

@Zaku “I think most people are way off-base in their assumptions that robot cars are going to be less dangerous than human drivers.”

The thing is, it’s a VERY low bar to be less dangerous than an average human driver. Humans are generally pretty terrible drivers. They text-and-drive, they drive drunk/high, they get distracted by their children screaming in the backseat, fumbling with the radio/navigation, they overcorrect when they loose traction, they slam on the breaks when they shouldn’t, change lanes dangerously without signaling, tailgate, etc.

I think it’s still a little ways away, but once they get it to a certain point, I think progress will accelerate very quickly.

@gorillapaws I don’t think humans in general are terrible drivers. In fact I think they’re pretty miraculous at not hitting each other even when driving in some pretty amazing conditions sometimes, such as highway driving during night time winter weather with mud and salt on the road, winding mountain roads, wind gusts, etc.

I acknowledge that there are some bad drivers and that people make mistakes that lead to accidents.

However as I wrote above, I think computer cars will be dangerous in different ways than humans tend to be dangerous, and in ways even the experts are not yet fully aware of, and that we’ll discover as more and more of them are set loose on the roads, more time in put in by them, and they start to get dirty and to break down. And, as people neglect them or intentionally target them for abuse (which intelligence agencies, criminals, psychopaths and teenagers will do). There will be new types of dangers, and the human drivers driving alongside robot cars will not be expecting all of the types of things a malfunctioning robot car may do.

I don’t know if that will be more or less dangerous than human drivers, but I do know the types of danger will be different, and I’m apprehensive of the new types of unexpected hazard I may encounter when driving on roads with robot cars.

I totally agree @Zaku the damn thing is whisking you down one of our mountain highways at highway speeds,and suddenly the right turn sensor goes on the fritz and whisks you right off the road into the canyon then river.
I have seen a ton of sensors fail in my day,I also think the maintenance on these wonder vehicles is going to be insane$$.
I don’t disagree that a great deal of people are very bad drivers and these types of vehicles might work very well for them.
My bitch is for the people that will be forced into these vehicles, not all of us are bad drivers and still enjoy driving we should have the option of staying with a manually driven car if we so choose.

I don’t think there would be a 100% conversion. A lot of people would use it however, particularly on long drives and urban traffic. Can’t see a lot of off-roaders using it.