If you value your time, self driving cars make more sense.
Not everybody like driving, or they don't care about driving.
Driving is not a hobby for everyone.

Coming from a world of automation (Aviation). The self driving car is a long ways from being a reality without a lot of deaths. Until every car is self driving, and human factors are taken out of the picture it is not a safe endeavour. There is a reason airplanes are not fully automatic at this point, and even to this day where automation can do so much, failures always show up from time to time and rear their ugly head.

I don't think you realize the difference between auto industry aviation industry.

Aviation industry is extremely hard to innovate due to streict rules and multi million $ fee to approve any new technology.

Even if you wanna approve fuel injection, multi million $ fee right there.

The only way to get away with that is to label your aircraft as EXPERIMENTAL and this is why many aircrafts come with carburetor, magnitoes, etc.

Any FAA or ICAO regulated aircrafts don't even bother to innovate unless there's an extreme demand for it.

Self driving cars are going to be a nightmare, simply because when something does go wrong the person inside will lack the experience to do anything about it.

Google and Apple (I think?) have proven that self driving vehicles will be decreasing accidets dramatically. It's just a matter of time.

Timpo, in fact I do have a fairly good idea between the two industries.

I'm not saying Mr. Musk, or Mr. Google are not able to get their technologies into the real world. What I stated, is it will not happen without many deaths.

Until computers can read gestures, make eye contact or other human interactions it is a disaster waiting to happen. You may not realize it, but the amount of human interaction you have with other drivers is huge.

Automation can not read this. If all cars were automated, and used a system to communicate with other cars (Like some Airplanes), it would be very possible to have this technology and be very successful. Until you take out the human factors out of the equation you will have issues.

This isn't even getting into scenarios where automation fails and the human has to take over. History has show, even in instances where individuals with good motor skills, and experience can lose their ability to properly handle an airplane after years of automation (Take a look at Malaysian flight into SFO a couple years ago). Never mind new drivers who learned to drive a self driving vehicle and all of a sudden need to take over without ever having touched the wheel of any vehicle.

All i'm saying is it has a long way to go before it will be truly safe.

It's not just Musk and Google. it's Mercedes, BMW, GM, Nissan and other car manufactures.

Uber has signed a 10 billion dollar contract with Mercedes to provide self driving cars.
BMW says it will have self driving tech in some of it's cars by 2021
GM is working with Uber competitor Lyft and has invested 500 million
Nissan says they will have 10 cars with significant autonomous functionality by 2020

Imagine if you have a 10 hour drive. Instead of waking up early in the morning to go you leave at night, sleep in the car and arrive in the morning. I could see a big increase in RV sales and rentals. Talking road trips will never be the same.

And until all cars on the road are self driving, or at least have direct interaction between the two (Self driving, and non self driving) stating intent, or even just other drivers input it will be up to a computer to make a humans decision.

If federal regulations all of a sudden state no manual driven cars allowed on the road, this would be a different story.

I sure as hell hope they've used the aviation industry as research. As the aviation industry hasn't exactly mastered the science of coping computers with human interaction.

Once it is in place and error free, I agree. It will be brilliant. Until that point, i'll keep my hands on the wheel.

Why are you comparing aviation and auto industry at first place?

Eye contact for what? other drivers on cell phone? jaywalkers that aren't even paying attention? Science has proven that those things can be detected by sensor, quite frankly, faster than humans can react.

If something fails, self driving cars will stop and pull over immediately.
This technology has been proven by Toyota(and probably other manufactures) more than a decade ago. It catches sleeping and driving, when the driver gets drowsy, it will safely pull over.

On the other hand, aircraft will have to prepare for emergency landing, transponder code to emergency, mayday calls, passenger briefing, finding a spot to land, calculate landing distance, gliding distance, landing angle, wind speed, gusting direction, etc.

It's a totally different game in the sky compare to the road.

Perfection does not exist, nothing is 100%.

However the self driving vehicles are already much safer than humans.

They have tested multi million miles already, and pulled the stats how many accidents humans have per how many miles travelled, so far I think it's something like 150 times safer than human driving.
(How many accidents you get into every how many miles travelled)

Edit: you know what. Timpo, your right.

The technology is great, and there won't be any issues dealing with human interaction on the road.

The future is electric cars wither self driving or not. The reason of gas guzzlers is over. We'll start seeing more and more sporty electric cars as well as larger passenger class versions like bosses. Eventually, roads will become a power grid where wireless charging of the EV is possible (currently being experimented on the other side of the globe using existing tech) As sad as it is, never mind manuals, all gasoline related related parts will be gone once the switch is flipped. You'll probably have to drive miles to that one last gas station to fill up your vehicle when that day comes.

I don't even drive my Evo much anymore and it comes out only a few times a year. My next car will be fully electric but it'll be a suv class. Waiting for the affordable awd/4x4 suv era :)

I don't know why you're so concerned about human transaction. I know what you mean, but in the end, self driving cars are safer.

As I said, nothing is 100% and I'm sure there are flaws just like anything else.

But one solid fact is that it's whole a lot safer than letting humans drive.

People are thinking self-driving = no fun. This might be true but nobody knows what it will be like in the future. And it will be a long time before regulations allowing full self-driving cars.

What you can expect in the near future though are more assisted-driving cars. Like Tesla's. When you don't want (for example, tired), you don't have to pay as much attention, the car will autopilot fairly safely. When you want to enjoy driving, then you can step on it. That's a luxury. This is why it will great.