Well, no. By the time the bugs are worked out, we won't need to travel any more: we'll just jack into a VR drone at our destination and 'be there' over the Internet.
The companies pushing driverless cars are working on the wrong problem. It's like building a better buggy-whip when the first Model-T is about to leave the production line.
Although maybe they'll be of some use to move the drone bodies around to where they're most needed.
It seems like sending them off to the wilds of Scotland is the edge case application. Driverless cars as a just-in-time local transit solution have a lot of possibilities. Uber, without the drivers. Which is probably why Uber is so interested in them. It'll be a long time if ever before you have self driving cars taking themselves off to the backwoods of Scotland, but for urban transportation where you have the ability to fit infrastructure to support it, it would mean fewer people need to own cars to supplement existing transportation.
Same with trucks on major motorways; they don't need to be self-driving to every last little village, just between major distribution points and sorting centers. (Where robots can attach the local deliveries to drones.
)
As a cyclist, I'd much rather navigate in traffic with driverless cars than human drivers talking on their phones or texting or drinking coffee and putting on makeup and singing along to the music or turned around shouting at their kids or distracted by the argument they just had with their boss or their boyfriend. I don't have to worry about if driverless cars are sober.
There are legitimate concerns about security and safety. If Internet of Things companies have taught us anything, it's that people designing network enabled objects tend to have a big blind spot where network security should be. And people testing these things need to make sure their cars can, for instance,
see dark skinned pedestrians. But on the whole, I'd rather have computers operating the fast moving heavy machines in my environment than
humans using personal and arbitrary definitions of which traffic rules are important.
Personally, though, I think trains need to make a comeback. Proper high speed rail. Japan has fantastic trains; I don't understand why we can't have that in Europe.
