I will never buy a fully autonomous vehicle. Yes, I said never ... they want there to be no accelerators, no steering, no brake pedals, no human control over the vehicle at all.
It's funny, but right now I wouldn't even own a modern car. I like my cranky old Alfa Romeo and its sophisticated system of about 8 wires, tying the ignition to 3 or 4 spark plugs (depending on its mood). You hand crank the windows where you want em before you start driving and live with it. It doesn't even have a radio, nor should it, because the sound of it on the road is it's own music. It's the most fun, unreliable, gutless, yet speedy, and probably dangerous car I've ever driven, and I'm certain I'll meet my death in it eventually. But the thought of a car you can't completely disassemble and reassemble with a crescent wrench and mallet gives me the shakes. I don't want computers anywhere near my car.
That said, when I envision what will replace the individual carriage a few centuries from now, it's driving your electric up onto a network of track, being carried in a mag-lev configuration at extremely high-speed to your destination by simple voice commands, & at your preferred distance from other vehicles, but with route and speed controlled by the central transit coordination software via the tracks own data network. The wide, multi-lane tracks induction-charge your batteries en route, following your local communications point along with you, & tightly coordinated traffic flows at hundreds of miles per hour, with intersecting routes at distances to avoid aerodynamic turbulence, and steady accelerations & decelerations timed to provide a smooth, imperceptible gradient over your trip distance. As the car exits that highway, the autopilot takes you to the end of the pavement, where you arrive at the dirt road or trailhead with batteries charged and full manual control.
I built models of this system as a little kid. The US lacks the vision & will to try big things these days, so major change certainly won't happen in our lifetimes, but I think the automated vehicle fits in to the big inevitable picture, and is a small enough part of the whole that private industry can tackle it in the mean time. Perhaps in a rebuilding era, some time after large-scale nuclear destruction, when a foreign nation steps in in a rebuilding effort, the US will have a more ideal opportunity to design its transportation plan from top to bottom with modern technology, rather than twenty legacy systems stemming back from the horse & buggy.
