Why not? I'm seeing numerous, huge advantages to the driverless cars. The only advantage to a normal car is that sometimes they can be fun to drive. Frankly, I'd be more than happy to make that tradeoff, and I suspect I'm not unusual in that regard.

I'm not convinced that trade-off would exist. It can't possibly be hard for a driverless car to kick control over to a human driver.

There is a significant potential saving in temoving the now-redundant controls. Also, as computers become safer than humans, human drivers may be actively discouraged.

Would you also like to cut off your legs and replace them with computer controlled wheels?

Once again HN and techies in general are a ridiculously small percentage of the population. Normal people do not see things the same way.

People have already replaced their legs with wheels to a very large degree. The computer control is just an added nuance.

Wait until, driverless cars are mandatory. Do you have any idea how many people die each year in car accidents. The vast majority of those are caused by human error.

Human error extends beyond the act of driving... it could be bald/frayed tires, non-existent brakepads, old wipers, missing turn lights, etc.

If those are addressed by driverless cars (ie, johnny-cab) then we're probably going to see a significant drop in freeway accidents.

On the other hand, will those driverless vehicles be capable of handling the unpredictable human drivers on the road?

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration only 5% of accidents are caused by mechanical failures.

Drunk driving alone (at least in 20004) is the cause of 30% of fatal accidents during the weak and over 50% during the weekend.

So even if car maintenance is still left to humans, we'd see a massive decrease in car accidents and subsequent deaths.

>will those driverless vehicles be capable of handling the unpredictable human drivers on the road?

With certainty, yes they will, and with much better reaction times than humans. In 2004 at the DARPA grand challenge the farthest any car got was 11.78 km.

1 year later 22 cars got farther than that, and 5 completed the race (240 km).

Self driving cars have only kept improving over the last few years. The Google car has never had an accident while in autonomous mode, only while a human was in control.

Self driving cars will be here. When is going to be dictated legislation, but when that time comes, they will save tens of thousands of lives per year.

The majority are pedestrians cyclists etc. Those deaths wont suddenly be solved.

In 2008 pedestrian and cyclists deaths accounted for only 14% percent of traffic fatalities in the US.

Where did you get "The majority."

Also most of those deaths were caused by human errors, why do you think they won't be solved by removing human error from the equation? Do you think driverless cars will keep running down pedestrians at the rate humans do?