Stay on roads. Don’t run into people or objects (e.g. fallen trees) on roads. Don’t drive into tornadoes. Obey traffic laws. Follow other vehicles at safe distances. Don’t cut others off or otherwise drive in a way that other vehicles can’t reasonably react to safely. Takes turns, starts and stops at accelerations which vehicle occupants can reasonably acclimate to. Watch out for breaks, potholes and other defects in the road surface itself. Don’t drive faster than the visibility allows; if there is dust, fog or snow that reduces visibility, slow down before arriving in the reduced-visibility area. Watch for wet or icy patches of road, and slow down before arriving at them. Drive more slowly in snow or on ice. (Periodically do “brake checks” to ascertain safe braking rates under current conditions.) Look out for emergency vehicles, accidents, “unexplained brake lights”, signal or sign outages, riots or criminal attacks, and other non-usual conditions ahead of the vehicle and modify driving in light of the information. Pull over for emergency vehicles that are flashing their lights and/or activating their sirens. If there is an earthquake, stop, but, if there is a tsunami coming, renavigate and drive to high ground as rapidly as safely possible. Avoid routes that are known to have road hazards (washed out, avalanched, forest fire, etc) unless they aren’t completely blocked and are the only exits from a worse local situation (e.g. volcanic eruption).
I have rarely had a gps show me the correct location of anything. One time, it said I was driving several thousand mph. It always shows the path from town to home is out in the middle of the river. It’s constant, “recalculating” was so annoying we took that one out of the car and threw it into the back of the storage closet. No, I think I’ll continue to drive myself.
Another time, instead of going from A, to B, to c, it took me from A, to Q, to C, to L, to X wasting my time and gas driving all over town.
The thing is, everything you listed there requires a separate code module to be programmed into the car’s computer. As a human, you can see a situation that you have never seen before and extrapolate how you should respond based on similarities to other situations you have encountered. How is a car going to do that? It may have hundreds or thousands of algorithms programmed in, but it is impossible to predict every situation that can arise, meaning that it is impossible to write an algorithm for every situation. We have all seen bizarre behavior in computers—do you want those bizarre glitches manifesting when you are riding along in your self-driving car and you don’t have the skill to take over because you have only been taught rudimentary driving skills?
I know that those who are enamoured of technology love the idea of self-driving cars, but I honestly don’t see them happening.
Besides, the prospect of sitting in a car, doing nothing while waiting to arrive, is not at all appealing. I’d rather drive, and be busy at something.