Or a roundabout that has two lanes in one direction and one in the other. E.g. two lanes east/west and one lane north/south.

Yes we have some of those in BC.

Will it be legal to wear the Apple Watch (or for that matter any smart watch) while driving (where handheld devices are outlawed)? One hopes that it will be illegal to use it as a phone replacement, but legal to wear. But that leads to people cheating and a very hard to enforce law.

Will the Apple Watch have a kill switch? Will the laws requiring kill switches in smart phones mandate a kill switch? Now that we are getting safer from being robbed because iPhones are hard to sell when stolen do we want to have yet another expensive Apple Gadget that people will covet and therefore provide a market for stolen ones.

Given a system that can track changes to your trajectory in space within millisecond time frames it is likely that any autonomous car will know what you are doing without any need to signal it.

It will also have situational awareness. So will be able to make predictions of likely behaviour. E.g. if you are in the bike lane, near a corner and make a slight swing out to the right it will wait to see if you are going to lane change to turn left or start back the right to make a right turn.

All of which most drivers wouldn't even notice as they have limited attention and that may be directed somewhere else through an intersection.

Yes, better to kill 30,000 plus people every year. It is simply inconceivable that there might be a better solution.

The owner of a parking lot could engineer in the specific parking locations he wants cars to use and the cars will automatically park exactly centred on them without a problem (thanks GPS..)

Alternately, once a large number of cars are autonomous they can drop you off at the door and then go and park themselves. Also they can pack themselves in as the current "parked" cars can move to allow them in and out. A parked autonomous car can move around in the parking lot to suit current requirements. All of which means that the number of parked cars is higher so parking lots can be smaller.

If cars (automated or otherwise) are using the roads, then data about its current condition and any changes will be available. The more cars that use a route the faster changes get propagated.

You have heard about this thing called the Internet? It does work I'm told from within moving objects like cars thanks to LTE and 3G.

Its called street view. See how much of your local city has been scanned. They already have a fleet of cars doing this.

Just a matter of beefing up their street view cars to collect any additional information they need and when they make their next pass through your neighbourhood you will have been scanned.

Analysing the data is just a matter for big iron. And Google is getting very good at building out that required infrastructure.

The Google concept car can be used now.

Think campus, airport shuttle, gated neighbourhoods, retirement communities.

Correct, there may be situations where the best of the best of skilled human drivers will do a better job.

On the other hand most drivers are simply not that good.

Unfortunately 80% of all drivers THINK they are that good. Some of them MIGHT be that good a small amount of the time, but not ALL of the time.

Autonomous cars will attain a specific level of competence (which will improve over time) and will operate at the level all the time. They don't get impatient. They don't get tired. They don't text. They don't try and pick up the soother in the back seat that the baby dropped (yes, recent cyclist death was due to driver doing that.)

Hmm, in most places as soon as the snow hits the ground human drivers prove that THEY cannot drive on snow either.

I suspect that this is another intractable problem that won't actually prove to be all that hard to solve. Where solve simply means doing a better job than 90% of the human drivers out there.

Hm, no interpolating the trajectory of a moving object in space is something that the best physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists simply have not been able to solve. It is an intractable problem that can only be solved in real time by organic brains.

Of course the Iron Dome might just be a counter example (those sneaky Israelis obviously didn't get the memo!)

99.9999% of human drivers!!!!!!

Give me a fscking break. You obviously don't actually ride around cities on a bike.

I spend a huge amount of time on a bike. I'd be happy if 75% of drivers paid attention. Simply put, human drivers DO NOT pay attention at the best of times and don't see cyclists a large percentage of the time.

One of the reasons I want to see only Google cars on the road is BECAUSE I'm a cyclist and figure my chances of staying alive will improve dramatically.

I guess you didn't see the YouTube video showing a Google Car safely moving around a cyclist who also moves out of the shoulder.

You miss the point. Hitting anything at speed can injure the occupants.

So you need to treat anything that could possibly move into the path of the car as a potential threat.

That includes bikes, kids, pedestrians, deer, coyotes, moose, skunks, dogs, teenagers carrying trashcans or other large objects, etc.

That means slow down and keep a safe distance. Hmm. Just what human drivers are SUPPOSED to do (but often don't.)

Yes, it probably would reflect back to their own population.

a) they don't care
b) they would blame it on the US
c) they would blame it on the Israelis
e) they would call them martyrs
f) they don't care