Improbable Insights

The Road to Self-Driving Cars Meaning We're joined this week by Will Smith, of Tested.com and Maximum PC fame. Eric, Will, and I riff on the topic of driving automation. Eric can't wait for the day when he has his autonomous vehicle, which he plans to turn into a rolling man-cave. We've seen tons of virtual ink spilled about autonomous vehicles, but fully autonomous cars cruising our highways and byways on a large scale is still years away.  Today, however, you'll find lots of partial automation in even mainstream cars. These features are collectively known as ADAS -- advanced driver assistance systems. Adaptive cruise control, automated lane-keeping, blind-spot detection, traffic sign detection, and more, are already available in many car models. Soon, we'll have pedestrian detection, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. What's the impact of these partial automation tools? Will driving habits change? Will we have safer highways, even before the robot overlords t