[Viffermike]

I've posted about this issue previously: I don't think it will happen anytime soon (i.e., 15-20 years) because with an autonomous vehicle, culpability for a mishap -- and they will happen -- will fall not on the operator or the passenger, but on the manufacturer or the system operating the vehicle. Squarely, unequivocally, and litigiously. It will completely change the fabric of not only the auto industry, but the insurance industry as well.

My argument? Warfare. Drones, cruise missiles, and the like all miss sooner or later. Who's culpable? The government operating the pilotless machinery -- not the operator, not the conditions, not the circumstances.

Besides: with autonomous vehicles sharing roads with conventionally operated ones, there will be a segment of the latter who will try, intentionally or not, to cause havoc among the former. Think motorcycle hooliganism, or the odd teen-ager roaring down a residential street in a Z28, or the illegal (and uninsured) driving at or below the speed limit in a 20-year-old Corolla with a rusty undercarriage and bent rim but who thinks he has to drive that car the same way he drives it in, say, Bogota, or Mexico City, or Tegucigalpa.

The technology's great. But, like all game-changing technologies, it won't be adopted overnight. It will be adopted slowly ... and probably not completely for decades.