Google: Driverless cars are mastering city streets

They've been testing in the suburbs.

Now let's see in the city streets where every driver's a jerk!

One thing a young adult has that a computer still doesn't is a will to live, even with the distractions that often accompany young adult drivers, they may STILL be safer at this point in development.

The idea of driverless cars scares me, and I am not particularly happy about the idea of betting my life on the ability of some Google programmer, whatever safety claims are made. Such is the nature of human beings; we trust our instincts, not statistics or the people who hire the statisticians.

I will never relinquish control of my vehicle to a computer, unless I'm drunk or injured. Which brings up a good point... no drunk drivers. I think if the technology is ever fully implemented, people will need to be able to switch in and out of autopilot at will. But then if they have an accident, they can always claim the computer was driving at the time. Does that mean alot of people will be suing car makers and google to try and get out of the responsibility of crashing? Cops of the future may have to download black box info from the computer to see who had control at the time of the crash. I imagine alot of car enthusiasts going to shady mechanics to get their computers turned off or hacking the system to turn features off the way they put chips in to tune them nowadays. Also, the navigation system has to work with satellite somehow to know where it is... what happens when it loses connection? Does it get lost? Does it keep driving? Will it ask strangers for directions for me? I wouldn't want to fall asleep in a car that could relinquish control to me at any time if it's own system fails or if it gets lost. On the plus side, if they are all effectively networked together, computers could work out algorithms for keeping traffic flowing. Will this end traffic jams? It'll be interesting to see how they deal with each problem faced by drivers on the road today. But they can't possibly match my instinct and intuition. Most of the time I know when someone is about to jump into the lane in front of me nearly taking out my front bumper, so I can react before that happens. Will a computer be able to understand the subtle nuances and cues of today's driver to predict such things?