The Amazing Benefits of Driverless Cars

Automobile travel transformed how people relate to distance: it decentralized how people live and work, and gave them a new array of choices for everything from the Friday night date to the long-distance road trip. I occasionally marvel that we can take our family of five, with all our gear, door-to-door for a getaway to a YMCA family camp 250 miles away in northern Minnesota--all for the marginal cost of less than a tank of gas. Driverless cars may turn out to be one of those rare inventions that transform transportation even further. KPMG and the nonprofit Center for Automotive Research published a report on "Self-driving cars: The next revolution." last August. It's available from the KPMG website here, and from the CAR website here. I missed the report when it first came out, but then saw this story about it in a recent issue of the Economist magazine.