http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dboV9rwgfjw

Anyone want to help me rig my Expedition, so it can do that.
I figure all I need to do is sell my house, take out a massive loan (or two) Rip out the rear seat, slap in some computers, sensors, and cameras. Link them together, and hey! I can enter it into the DARPA Autonomous Vehicle Race. I could have "IMCDb" painted on it’s side in big letters (good advertisement for the site)

*Wishful thinking* Probably wouldn’t win, it would get just past the Starting line, run into a barrier and rollover...

Sadly, that thing probably drives better than 90% of the people on the roads today.

Sure, you get the money (plentiful, please) and I'll develop the autonomous driving system for you. That's one of my research fields.

I wonder what happens when there is a bug in the sensor thing. As there are bugs in all cars with electronic that we have these days, that could be much more dangerous than problems like the ABS that disconnects sometime (a problem that I have on my 206).

That would probably be a real bug ...




The problems today are less often the electronics or software, but the connectors. If proper material would be used, avionics and military electronics show how to do it, cars were less often grounded by defunct circuits. But reliable cars are bad for the economy! Who would pay all the car mechanics and spare part dealers?

For safety relevant systems redundancy is the key word. You have that in trains and airplanes for decades. Systems with identical functionality are installed in triplicate or more, often using not a similar, but different design, to avoid failure through design faults.
Once fully autonomous vehicles are available for mixed traffic, i.e. traffic where still people are driving manually in the same lane, the systems will be extremely reliable. But that is still some years into the future. My estimate is that mass production will see autonomous vehicles around 2020.

... would then be the Peugeot 2-0-12 ...

I guess you better be ready to grab the steering wheel + wearing your seatbelt...

Impressive and all, but I've been going a little crazy just from taking the bus every day - I can't imagine giving up driving altogether (I've leapt at just about any chance I get to drive at work).

That being said, as long as enough redundancy was designed it, it'd make the roads much safer.