"And if its Friday afternoon in the summer w/cape traffic I might get 2 drinks in."

Always the worst day....

murph...not being cynical of you in anyway...

With that consideration, MADD should be all over self-configured and navigated vehicles.

No designated driver needed....DUI drops off....open container laws adjust to circumstance.

Insurance premiums drop in half.....maybe lol. Depends of what they feel of self-navigating 4000 lb vehicles.

IMO, for vehicle self-navigation, combined with motor/body controls managed by sensor I/O propagation alone.... will not work in our lifetime in the context of liability.

It would require a base technology to absorb liability that might lead to a complete tether-less vehicle, that may function within our litigious society.

A base tethered technology that may absorb some of the liability in our life time, would be trace sensor elements embedded within and along side of roadways (hard wired and wireless) that signal issues of road conditions, traffic conditions, traffic control conditions, directional issues, emergency conditions...etc.

In other words, the surroundings are detailed into an on going logical map of sensor elements...and all the sensors communicate, vehicle to road...etc, ... giving, as complete as possible, the big picture.

A combination of tethered and tether-less may lead to the advancement of complete tether-less self-navigation in the future.

From my prospective, no one is being serious… until they start talking serious infrastructure. Which could mean putting a redundant ID sensor on every object down a roadway.... including other vehicles and beyond.

No one is talking infrastructure yet, at least not in the public eye as vibrant they are with the GOOGLE crap.

Now, if one wants to consider sensors and sensor I/O as it all relates in a collective system/network, this is a serious network that is wide open to anyone…

All it takes is vision and some really serious entrepreneurial efforts to pull all the pieces together.

Detailing a logical sensor map should be a walk in the park for a company like e.Digital, seeing that it already has the insight to detail in a logical fashion.

Now that I have thrown it out there, not that efforts are not being ventured as I comment... watch the news and see what happens in the way of getting serious about the self-navigating vehicle in the news.... and what really needs to be in place.

Sorry about the do over..

FWIW

doni