I was doing the 9 hour interstate drive to the cabins, would love a self driving car for that trip. I would probably not use the feature in around town driving.
Even if we still had people driving cars manually, the communication would still help. If you slam on the brakes, and every car behind you gets the ācar 24601 is slamming on the brakesā message, the entire pack can react appropriately rather than having a chain reaction of increasing reaction times as we do now. The car all the way at the back of the pack will hit the brakes at the same time as the car directly behind you - no more accordion crashes.
Driverless cars with manual options could transmit a āthis car under manual controlā message which would tell the car behind it to increase its following distance to compensate for mistakes made by the human.
Even classic cars could be retrofitted appropriately - not too many people would object to sticking a small transponder under the hood of a '57 chevy that didnāt do anything but register an ID for the car and tell the network that it was being controlled manually so that the other cars could adjust appropriately. Of course, there would need to be some data privacy laws put into place first, so that random government agencies couldnāt snoop on where everyone was going all the time, but those are laws that need to be enacted right now anyway thanks to license plate scanners that are becoming more and more prevalent on both law enforcement and civilian vehicles.
If you want to find out how well driverless taxis work, go to Pittsburg later this month. Uber will start using driverless cars in downtown Pittsburg in a week or two.
That should be an interesting real-world test.
There will be a real person as backup.
Now that will take all the fun out of it!!!
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It will still operate autonomously unless somethings is awry.
I wonder how the computers will feel about being second guessed by a human?
Like HAL in 2001 a Space Odysseyā¦ 
I just did a trip from Southern California up to the Bay Area on I-5, posted speed limit 70, traffic going 78-83 mostly. Lots of cars and trucks. My new Honda has adaptive cruise control so I set it to 80 and let it do its thing. As I caught up to a car it slowed down and maintained a pre-set distance, and if the car in front sped up or moved over my car sped up to 80. If someone cut in front of me my car slowed down hard. I was able to go most of the trip without touching the brakes myself. I did hold on to the steering wheel, and tried the lane keeping assist, but the feeling through the wheel was truly creepy. It felt like the front end was loose, because the car was making its own corrections to stay in the center of the lane. I had to turn it off.
The cruise control was really nice to have, it made the trip a bit more relaxed, and Iāll use it again. The lane keeping, Iām not so sure.
But watching a steady stream of trucks rolling along in the opposite direction, each one with its own driver and its own power, all relying on each otherās skills, I kept thinking that some form of self driving with data sharing among all the vehicles within a half mile or so seemed reasonable.
I had the same experience in a new loaner Acura I was driving while mine was having work done. Adaptive cruise was great. Lanekeeper was next to useless. It fought me when I wanted to steer, and if I let it do the work it would get confused at every offramp because it works by watching the lane marker line, which curves away from the road at ramps, and the car hesitantly wanted to follow that curve until it noticed that the left side lane marker was getting farther away.
The guy behind me probably thought I was drunk. I turned it off and never used it again.