
Thinking to the future, I don't trust this at all. The RAC reckon there are 34,000,000 cars on British roads (2011). Knowing the state of the IT industry and the inability for anyone to actually do their job properly (working partially in IT support, and work in general has made me really pessimistic about the ability of people in general), I am seriously scared of a bug/hardware malfunction/bad design at 70mph.
Not to mention that the costs for this would spiral out of control and nobody would take any responsibility for anything, and the project will change direction many times and be massively overdue.
So when the general population have been trained out of being able to reverse bay park, or are seriously out of practise, what happens when a manual override is required?
The concession I can make is that this should only be for motorways as mentioned above, essentially an auto-pilot type system as long motorway driving is burdensome and this seems more achievable than rural driving.
I like driving, and we all make mistakes (lack of attention/judgement/timing etc) but I don't like the idea of losing freedom - I don't need my car to be driven for me.
Sure, fit a breathalyser, attention monitor, sleep monitor to my car so I cant be irresponsible, but let me do the driving.
Also (just remembered!), it said in the article that the human driver will be there to override the car to prevent mowing down pedestrians. In actual fact the human will be day-dreaming, reading a book, on their phone, or watching the countryside go by and will totally fail to react in time. Seriously, who is going to pay full attention when they have no actual need to control the car?