Autodrive may become a reality.

Roland Piquepaille's blog, has a story about self navigating cars. Apparently there is a push to create cars that drive themselves. While robot controlled vehicles are clearly not ready for the mainstream, progress is being (rapidly) made. A timeline of 20-30 years does not seem too unrealistic.

Of course, other obstacles may prevent the automatically piloted car from ever seeing the market. Even if the robot vehicle is 100 times as safe as a human would be, and everybody switches to the new robot drivers, that still leaves (statistically) 500 deaths and innumerable injuries every year, which can be pinned directly on the designers of the control systems. Other safety systems have been withheld from the US market because of litigation concerns.