However valid that analysis may be, we already *know* that humans aren't robust. I think that the GPS is the first step in a long line of innovations that will end with cars that can reliably (and more reliably than most humans) drive themselves.
My point was more that the level they're at right now is still light years away from even being close to the robustness of human beings -- and the problems that plague them aren't just unsolved at the practical level either; They're unsolved even at the level of strictly academic exercises.
The cases where they handle themselves really well are pretty trivial, and a person who isn't asleep at the wheel or heavily inebriated would not even have to put in any effort to do better. There's still the problem of acquiring sufficient information. There are things like the VW autonomous Golf, and that works for the case of road courses and such after memorizing a path, but it certainly isn't built to dynamically adapt to things like traffic and detour routes and so on. Most all such systems will require augmentation from the environment as well such as traffic lights actually feeding signals back to the cars themselves.
If you're using tools like this to augment the limits of what a human being can do, that's fine. And there are several cases where this sort of thing already exists. Cars that have smart cruise control that senses traffic, self-parking, night-vision windshield HUDs, crash alerts and so on. All this stuff can *help*, but don't kid yourself that we'll be able to have autonomous cars within the next 20 years. It's simply nowhere near that point.
Bear in mind that with anything like that, the kinds of safety standards and rigorous testing and approvals and several tonnes (literally) of red tape you have to go through means that even if, by some miracle, we solved it all within 2009, it'll still be 2020 before it's even allowed to hit a single production vehicle.
Modern cars are dangerous by the way - I was in a new Nissan Quashkai II (or however you spell that) and you have no sense of speed at all. It's a very good car, but it's like a lot of other modern cars (Audi) - they invite you to drive extremely fast and you barely notice that you do.
That I can't really picture being an issue in the cases where a self-driving computer wouldn't work out. When I was in college, the 225-mile drive back home for any holiday period often caught me driving well over 90 without realizing it. It's not so much that the car was failing to exude any sense of speed, but that the highway was 4 lanes and almost completely empty all the time. The sort of vastness of empty space all around you would basically mask just how fast you were going. The same thing never comes close to happening when you're in a tighter
computers are cheap. hell GPS are under 100 euros now!
As long as you buy one without a screen, anyway. Difference in price between a simple receiver and one with software that actually gives you a map display and all is anywhere from 250 to 700 USD.
And how do you mean not mimic the pedal response of ICE cars? Pretty sure accelerators aren't mechanically attached in fuel injection cars anyway, it just provides an input for the ECU.
Depending on the vehicle, it could be mechanically linked to the throttle body valve. Many common vehicles these days do use a drive-by-wire gas pedal as you say, but when you get into higher-end or more enthusiast-oriented vehicles, I think the direct throttle body linkage is still there. There are exceptions, of course, particularly with all the borrowed tech that goes around, but that just goes with the territory.
