For as much as Americans complain about regulations, there's very little standardization in automobile driving environment (rules of the road, road paint and signage) or in the driver (uncle Joe can teach you how to drive in a few weeks, and essentially once licensed you're licensed for life as long as you pay a fee and don't become legally blind). Anyone who drives in the U.S. and either is a pilot or has driven in another industrialized country knows how non-standard automobile driving is in the U.S. This might make us fairly defensive and adaptive drivers, because our fellow drivers are so unpredictable due to non-standardization.
I think that makes the task of integrating autonomous cars a difficult task, not for the human driver, but for the computer. It has to be more adaptive and responsive with a lower error rate than the best American driver, while simultaneously sharing the exact same physical environment with non-deterministic actors.
Once we solve the pollution problem, all the HOV lanes can become autonomous car lanes. Only qualified cars use those lanes and they must be in autonomous mode. And conversely in mixed zones they can only be in some kind of hybrid mode. How insurance sorts out liability in the hybrid case will be interesting.
For all the non-regulation of US roadspace, I don't see any significantly different driving in Europe: having driven enough on both continents, it feels the same w/r/t unpredictable drivers. IMHO it doesn't matter whether the unpredictability comes from "has no training" or "has training but ignores it".
I think that makes the task of integrating autonomous cars a difficult task, not for the human driver, but for the computer. It has to be more adaptive and responsive with a lower error rate than the best American driver, while simultaneously sharing the exact same physical environment with non-deterministic actors.
Once we solve the pollution problem, all the HOV lanes can become autonomous car lanes. Only qualified cars use those lanes and they must be in autonomous mode. And conversely in mixed zones they can only be in some kind of hybrid mode. How insurance sorts out liability in the hybrid case will be interesting.