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I anticipate that self-driving cars will turn out to be far less popular than people expect. Here's why:
The AI will be programmed to leave a safe stopping distance between it and the car in front of it. It will be programmed not to drive assertively, but to give way to more assertive drivers. It will automatically take evasive action when someone changes lanes or pulls out into traffic.
This type of programming would actually reward the more assertive drivers in other cars. People in control of their own cars would be able to zip around the self-driving cars, especially once their driving style is known and so utterly predictable that everyone on the road will be able to spot the cars in automatic mode.
Now consider the people sitting in the self-driving cars. I've driven a lot of places, and one common thread is that drivers really don't like other people "beating" them at traffic. The guy sitting there letting the car drive will get irritated that the AI keeps letting people break in line, and he'll take it out of auto to drive it himself. Once you have enough people doing that, any collective benefit of self-driving cars is eliminated.
Whenever you see a self-driving car in a sci-fi movie, the passenger is always sitting there reading a newspaper as if he's on a train or subway, completely ignoring the outside world. But a self-driving car is not like a train. When you're on a train, you're not watching other more assertive trains pass you. And even if you did, it's completely out of your control, unlike an automatic car that you could switch to manual mode to do traffic battle.
The only place the self-driving mode will be attractive to non-commercial drivers is on long drives on sparsely populated roads. Most people rarely make long drives on sparsely populated roads. The overwhelming majority of time spent in cars is within a few miles of the driver's home, and a large percentage of the long distance driving is on fairly crowded interstates, where the cars would be taken out of automatic to negotiate traffic.
And once a few affordable cars have an automatic mode and people realize how little they will use it, they'll forego the cost of it and buy the cheaper version without a self-driving mode.
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