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After seeing the quality of a "German Engineered" Volkswagen Beetle, whose endless and unforgivable defects we constantly had to fix, I'd stay the hell away from their Auto Pilot Technology.
the beetle and many other volkswagens are assembled in mexico. their higher-end models are assembled in germany.
Non sequitur
These are the types of steps I'm guessing we'll see over the next few years towards driverless cars. It's not difficult to imagine these incremental changes becoming more and more frequent as companies compete in this space.

One thing that strikes me as interesting is the possibility for software upgrades in your car to enable more (automated driving) features. Once all of the hardware is in place it seems like a natural progression.

Who's to say that the hardware won't plateau well ahead of social norms, legislation, and software and that we won't end up with an awkward period of automated-ready cars?

This is exciting. Imagine downloading open-source autonomous driving firmware that pushes your car to the limits. Cops will issue tickets for "using a non-dmv certified autopilot algorithm that automatically slowed down at known speed traps." All the data is there. :)

It'll also be interesting to know how automaker's efforts intersect with Google's efforts. Sounds like an exciting problem to be working on.

Skynet will be able to kill off like 20% of the worlds popuplation by scheduling a car crash for everyone on the road at 8:50AM tuesday morning.

The most important feature of driverless cars is in the unexpected results. I can tell my car to pick me up, and suddenly we don't need big parking lots in front of walmart, you can just tell your car to "go find a parking place nearby" and tell it to pick you up when you are ready. Then we figure out I don't need to own a car, just a card to use a given car when I need it, so A car isn't taking up space at my house at night, or at my place of work in the afternoon. We can get by with much fewer cars.

You can use the SUV when you need to move something big and the family, and use a 1 seater when you are commuting to work.

Can't wait. There are people (like me) who are not allowed to drive for health reasons.