Do you see a day where autonomous vehicles will be the only vehicles on the roads?

Some claim that it will eliminate the need for transport drivers, wishful thinking but I have been in the industry way to long to see that happening , one example would be say a driverless truck broke down way out in the middle of nowhere with a million dollar payload say booze, or tobacco, wouldn’t take someone long to jack the load with nobody there.
They will have to have a human on board to babysit this wonderful technology,and protect the load in cases of breakdowns.(and there will be breakdowns)

Your example, as good as it is, doesn’t argue in favor of “drivers”. Security is a separate issue, also repair and recovery. I also don’t see autonomous tow drivers any time soon, since wrecks and recoveries take place in such varied condition and terrain that it will be a long time, if ever, before that process is automated.

But I do see North American and European roads being “primarily” autonomously driven at some point in the next twenty to twenty-five years, if not sooner.

That’s going to take a whole lot longer in the rest of the world, though. In fact, we might see autonomous flying drone transport (at least personal transport) before the roads are given over to autonomous driverless cars. That, in the same way that “the rest of the world” went nearly completely to mobile phones before the American market had done so: the infrastructure for “wired” phones just didn’t exist, so they made the quantum jump from “no phone” to “mobile phone” right away. In much of the rest of the world the roads are truly awful, so autonomous vehicles will have to deal with much worse road conditions than they will have been programmed for, and won’t be very useful. But flying drones will work pretty nicely.

I think there is a possibility of only autonomous vehicles, but a better probability there will only electric vehicles.

As fossil fuels diminish I can actually see the need for electric autos @Tropical_Willie .

Maybe as far a standard commuters are concerned, but not in the instances of specialized workmen, like house builders, plumbers, delivery vans, landscapers/landscape maintenance, etc.
Electric vehicles might be the norm for many, including the aforementioned commuters, but wouldn’t be practical for the others for obvious reasons. And what would/could one do if one wanted to go quite a ways out of town on a camping trip?

They already have an electric transport truck that has a range of 500kilometres ,electric is something that has to be explored because fossil fuels are not going to last forever,might be a few years down the road but it will happen.

Yes. In 50 years,or so. Only in more developed countries though.

I can easily imagine only autonomous vehicles on highways. Rural roads? Not so much.

Yes, absolutely!

They would be particularly useful on limited access toll roads. Drivers could be offered a discount if they drove autonomously.

Do you see a day where autonomous vehicles will be the only vehicles on the roads?
No

And if you do, when do predict this? 5years from now? 10years from now, longer?
LOL! Those dates are preposterously early even for widespread deployment.

And why the need for a driverless car or truck when most people claim to be the worlds best driver?
There is no need. The best reasoning I have read is the idea of reducing the number of needed cars (by sharing cars and making them something many people don’t own, either), and making transportation available to people without needing to have human drivers drive them about.

Once driverless cars are perfected they will be much safer to ride in. It will also be possible to route driverless cars to minimize traffic and to allow people to arrive at their destination in minimum time. I am sure they are the way of the future, but I have no idea how soon it will be. There is still more technology that will need to be developed to make them safe in city traffic.

@Zaku for large urban areas I can actually see that kind of thing maybe happening, not so much in rural areas.

The Model T is still driven on roads. That’s over 100 years old.

Many people like, or even love, driving cars themselves. Why would there ever be a day when there are roads with only autonomous cars, unless the surface of Earth in uninhabitable due to human industrial abuses or something?

I love driving,I do it for a living but there seems to be quite a push towards this autonomous thing.

Well, industry is behind it, and industry and its investors own our media and government and advertising agencies, and engineer public opinions, etc, and selling many people and businesses all-new cars and infrastructure for them and getting legal and public acceptance is all big big business, so naturally you will hear about it a lot, mostly in positive tones.

Mention that there are issues, and naysayers will appear, whether they actually disagree by themselves, or have read/heard the wave of positive media, or are actually involved in the industrial media somehow.

To a different degree, you can see the same phenomenon with discussions of other products. Take for example automatic transmissions. In the USA, there are conversations about how they are now totally better than manual and every car should have them and there is supposedly barely any reason for a manual transmission. Well, but check Europe, where manual transmissions are still quite prevalent. It’s less about real distinctions and more about conversations, which are sometimes heavily engineered by interested parties.

Oh?? The Industry makes more money selling automatics than they do manual ones, and then they convince the public they are safer and more efficient ?
I can totally see that.

Your opinion @SQUEEKY2 and the numbers lie, that automatics are better but not for you.

Once again technology is a loser because you say so.

I didn’t say that the guy above me did ^^ I just totally agreed with it, and if they are so fucking great why are they not a hit over seas?
Or maybe they just drive better than North Americans?
But you are right I don’t suck up and kiss technology because I am told to.
I embrace technology when it actually does good not just turn bigger profits for big corporations.