There is ZERO need to fast track this very important transition, no matter how hard the tech firms lobby their special interest. Let's not lets the corporations dictate things, even if they are our home town corps.
I totally support a well thought out plan with no "Rush rush, hurry hurry" sort of pressure.
I don't care how much $$ oogle and Tesla will make. Safety First. Everyone should settle down and do it right, even if its not in light with the quarterly earnings announcements.

Self-driving cars have two huge problems that need to be solved. First, no matter how "smart" the cars are, they can't protect their occupants from dangerously unpredictable behavior by incompetent, impaired, or overly aggressive human drivers, bicycle, and pedestrians. Second, there's a huge battle raging about who will bear the liability in case of an accident where the self-driving car is found to be at fault. Neither auto manufacturers nor auto insurance companies want to take on the huge responsibility for the safety of these vehicles.

This worries me greatly because I'm aging and figure that I'll need a self-driving car in 10 to 15 years to be able to continue to live independently in our home.

Self Driving Technology is about saving lives as well as money. There are 10's of thousands of lives lost on the highways each year. This technology would save many of those.

It's not about are they good or bad, its about not fast tracking them until they are safe enough for mixed use roads. That part takes time, do not rush things.

The cars are safer for humans and they drive in and around me all day every day. It's time to let them out for real. It will dramatically cut the 30,000 deaths and 100,000 serious injuries per year while enabling more people to get around more easily. The DMV rules are stupid and overly conservative. Applying similar conservative rules to people would restrict millions from driving because they've caused accidents and even deaths -- why let them on the road? It's time to start fixing the problem instead of denying access to self driving cars and denying access to cars with no steering wheel.

@Bill Hitchens

The liability issue does indeed need to be sorted out. But human drivers can't protect themselves or their passengers from dangerously unpredictable behavior by incompetent, impaired, or overly aggressive human drivers, bicycles, and pedestrians either, so I'm not sure why that's a barrier for self-driving cars.

Ultimately, they will save lives but in the short term they may have problems and we need to flush those out before saying anything goes.
The FDA goes through many rounds of drug trials before OK'ing drugs so why should the DMV OK Google cars statewide just because they've been driven a million miles in Mountain View.

For cities, the biggest changes in a world of purely self-driving cars are:
- Less of a need for localized parking
- Up to 2x the volume of cars on the road, if a vehicle has a driverless "return" trip.
- Virtually no accidents and no one breaking traffic laws (...and no revenue from tickets!)

These changes would have a profound impact on a city's infrastructure and design. It would take much longer for a city to get its design right than for the DMV to certify self-driving cars.

Unless we program self driving cars to tailgate, they will significantly reduce the capacity of our road network. Our roads carry more vehicles per peak hour than they were designed to. If cars start following the laws, fewer of us will die in crashes, but fewer cars will get through.

There are citizens with multiple DUI's under their belt that are still licensed to drive. DMV should rethink a few things. Not to mention the ones that are given permission To drive to work only. Like that's going to happen.

I understand the argument for caution, there's an argument for urgency as well. It's not like self-driving cars are a frivolous luxury. The status quo is one of perpetual lethality. There were 32,719 deaths from motor vehicle crashes in 2013 in the US. 3,000 of them were in California.

About 88 Americans died in car crashes yesterday.
Another 88 died today.
Another 88 will die tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that.

Lets see how well the assisted driving cars do. Where computers help prevent car accidents by stopping or turning. So far Google Self-Driving Cars Still Need Human Intervention.

Google’s autonomous vehicles in California experienced 272 failures

Can you imaging if we let any company make self driving cars can you say Hoverboard failures?

"...circled Thursday, Jan. 27, on their calendars." Jan 27 was a Wednesday.

I don't think having a licensed driver behind the wheel of a car that purports to be self-driving is safer. I think it's better to force engineers to assume that no competent human is available to bail the car out of tricky situations, and make the car truly self-driving.