Interesting reaction from many Freepers who insist they will never climb inside of a self-driving car and that they will cling to their old ways no matter what. These are the same people who probably vowed they would never use one of those confounded ATM machines or pay a bill on home computer back in the 1980s.
Speaking of home computers, I was one of the early adopters and there was a lot people who scoffed that I was throwing my money away on a hunk of junk. “Who the hell needs one of them computers in his house” they would say to me as they rattled their newspaper and reached for the remote to watch Dan Rather deliver the evening news.
Now these same old geezers are playing online blackjack on iPhones and watching Netflix on tablets and getting their news from a man named Drudge. The once trusted Dan Rather was destroyed by them online computer geeks and is now a pathetic bitter discredited washed up shriveled shell of a little man.
These self-driving cars are our future I’m afraid to say. Technology marches on. At some point in the future, our descendants will marvel at the fact that our society once allowed citizens to self-drive and hurtle about the countryside in two-ton metal death machines. To them, it will seem positively barbaric and medieval.
Look at how much trouble you're seeing here in the NYC region with public agencies that can't operate a rail system safely and efficiently. And trains on a closed rail system are much easier to operate than cars on an open road.
You've cited some good example of technological innovations that have become ingrained in our lives, but history is also filled with innovative inventions that never went anywhere because they were too impractical, too expensive, or too difficult to develop for a mass market. In the case of self-driving cars, it's not the technology that's really holding it back. It's the complexity of implementing it in an environment where there are already hundreds of millions of "regular" cars on the road.