About self driving cars in general: I am very concerned that self driving cars and speed limits are going to be a very annoying issue. I can see them drive way slow in semi-complicated situations annoying all other drivers. There are also many places in the county where it's normal and seemingly expected to go 5-10mp/h over the speed limit. Of course self driving cars will stay under the posted speed limit. I hope that in the long run we will be able to innovate on how we deal with speed limits especially once the human driven cars are off the road and hopefully illegal. But till then I can see lots of road rage coming from this.
I look forward to riding my bike 10mph in front of driverless cars.
This is one of the few things that excites me about driverless cars. People should be driving below the limit (and the limits should be about 10mph lower in a lot of places) for pedestrian safety. The fatality rate drops precipitously around 20mph.
Instead of mad honking drivers, the car will sniff your smartphone's Bluetooth address. Computers you go near will recognize the smartphone, know it's you, and they'll start crashing programs and slowing down the wifi...
I agree that city driving is a more complicated issue. Freeway speed limits are a much easier case, but maybe I'm just missing driving on the Autobahn.
Once autonomous cars are ubiquitous, it should be possible to increase speed limits substantially above where they are now, since the autonomous cars will have instantaneous reaction times.
Of course, but with instantaneous reaction times you can achieve the same stopping distance at higher speeds. If it takes one second for a driver to start braking when something happens (which is about the average) then a human driver going 65MPH will have the same stopping distance as an autonomous car going 78MPH.
