At a four-way stop with another autonomous vehicle, the Boss and its fellow "car-bot" communicated with one another, negotiating which would go first. "They are more polite than people," says Boules.

Price dampens consumer enthusiasm
Polite or not, people have to buy into these technologies if they're going to catch on. According to the recently completed Emerging Technologies Study, conducted each year by J.D. Power and Associates, there's a lot of interest in the individual systems that will make autonomous driving possible: 76 percent of those surveyed are interested in blind-spot detection; 74 percent want backup assist; 62 percent want a collision mitigation system; 60 percent want adaptive cruise control, and 46 percent want lane-departure warning. However, those percentages drop a bit when price tags are suggested for each system.

The $1,300 GM "Driver Awareness Package," offered on the Cadillac CTS and DTS and Buick Lucerne, includes lane-departure warning, blind-spot detection, and heads-up instrument-panel display. So far this year, 5 percent of CTS sedan buyers have opted for the package.

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J.D. Power's Mike Marshall, who oversees the Power study, says drivers will need time to get used to turning more and more control of the car over to computers and sensors. "Even I held my foot over the brake for a while before I trusted adaptive cruise control to do it for me, and I know more than most about how this stuff works," says Marshall.

The bigger payoff in having drivers spend a few thousand dollars to embrace autonomous vehicles is the huge improvements they promise in safety and fuel economy. About 43,000 people a year are killed in traffic accidents, including motorcycle accidents and pedestrians hit by moving cars. If every car had electronic stability control, for instance, fatalities would drop by about 10,000, according to estimates by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. If all drivers wore safety belts (about 81 percent do today), another 7,000 lives would be saved.

"The number goes down with each system to the point where [fatalities] would be so few that when it happened, it would really be an oddity," says Boules.

Much lighter
How could car-bots that drive themselves be more energy efficient? Vehicles would be so safe that automakers could dramatically reduce the weight of cars and trucks by eliminating a lot of steel, bumpers, etc. Even airbags eventually could be eliminated. Much more of the vehicle could be made from plastics and other synthetics, even recycled paper and other cellulose-based material. With weight reduction comes fuel economy. A minivan that gets about 19 miles per gallon today could be made to weigh less than a Honda Fit, which gets more than 34 mpg. And the Fit could be lightened up enough to get 45 mpg or better.

Here is the kicker: Older people will have the greatest incentive to embrace the newest technology, a reversal of the usual trend with emerging technology. As baby boomers age into their 70s and 80s, living longer thanks to drugs, artificial joints, heart valves, and the like, they will want to continue driving as long as possible. The biggest beef against elderly drivers today is that their reflexes and eyesight deteriorate before their desire to drive their own cars.

With an autonomous car that can be driven safely on autopilot, it's the car's eyesight and reflexes that will matter more than the driver's.

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