You know what's really bad-ass, is you take a 2nd hand kids Power Wheels car and adapt a RC car controller to it, using a big servo for the steering etc. Then you cut off the slow and safe kiddy motor and put on a big brushless high speed motor powered by a couple of motorcycle batteries. Change the plastic wheels for some rubber ones, and put on some shocks etc. Then you go practice jumping and flipping down at the BMX track! The body is practically indestructible.

QUOTE: "If there’s a break in communications, the car automatically brakes and sits in place until they’re resumed." - {A major highway traffic jam occured today as XXX firm's main server went down for 30 minutes, causing huge delays durng rush hour.} ALSO, seems like a real boon for suicide bombers - no suicide! Just drive and bomb!

Autonomous cars are the future. The average car is used fewer than 2 hours per day. If cars were fully utilized, we could have 1/12 the number of cars on the roads. Even if we are conservative by a factor of 4, that still means we could have all the cars we need and still have 2/3 fewer cars. In California, that would mean a reduction of 25,000,000 cars. Figuring an average of 600 sq ft each car needs for road space, parking and approaches at home, work, school, shops and entertainment, that would reallocate 15 BILLION square feet of space for better use. That's well over 500 square miles of mostly prime CA real estate that could be used for things other than automotive dead-space. 320,000 acres. At a reasonable (for California) $100,000 per acre, that's $32 BILLION dollars in real estate wealth that would be found...just lying around under parked cars.

"a human operator simply sits at the station and remotely drives the car as if they’re playing a video game" and " looking at taking things a step further." This is not taking things a step further. It's just RC driving with a large car and camera's and not even close to autonomous driving like google does.

guess that means if it runs over some one, no report, just stains on paint

Great: Not only 1-person-per-car congesting streets, now also driverless cars on top of that! That's progress ;)

Truly Autonomous cars could be programmed never to violate a speed limit, and would be quite safe with a drunken "driver". This would severely cut revenues for hard pressed traffic departments, and, if cars could park themselves legally, we can look forward to mass unemployment among traffic wardens. Do I hear laughter in the house?.

If it ever gets off the ground, it will last until the first serious accident.
And heaven help us if it is hackable - and not much isn't, I'm afraid. Iran's centifuges were not even connected to the internet, yet they suffered quite a sever hit (Stuxnet, or something that sounds similar). Oh what joy the hackers could have!

What is the point if it requires a driver? Having the driver in or out of the car doesn't make a difference- Its not really an autonomous car if it needs a driver. There really isn't any practical use for such technology other than in war where it might save lives. To be honest, I'd rather drive a car to work than having some random other guy driving me!

Car sharing doesn't really lower the number of cars on the road. It lowers the number of cars on the parking lot. This could make getting a cab in a bad neighborhood easier.