I think they were more implying that the software that makes the decisions should be common to all of them. That way we don't allow individual car manufacturers to make potentially fatal mistakes when cutting corners with their software development. I think at the very least there should be a standardisation, so that there can be some communication between cars to aid in resolving traffic jams and other uses.

>That way we don't allow individual car manufacturers to make potentially fatal mistakes when cutting corners with their software development.

Wouldn't all the cars by any manufacturer have to pass the same very rigorous driving tests in the first place, to be able to be sold in the market?

Then you will have people writing software with the aim of pass the tests, not real world safety. I don't think auto testing can catch the type of bugs that can arise sporadically, which could be fatal in the case of self driving cars.

The industry isn't going to just hand Google a monopoly. Of course they are going to develop their own as well.

Even if Google's software was the absolute bees knees, what if Google deprioritized it? Left the industry? Made unreasonable licensing demands, or made exclusivity deals with competitor automotive manufactures? What if they used it as leverage to push manufactures around?

Even if you do decide to work with Google for now, not having a backup plan is just poor strategic planning. Having a backup plan means developing these sort of systems yourself.

All I'm saying is that I trust Google to produce this software to a high standard, much much more than I trust the auto manufacturers to do so. I'm sure Google isn't developing their own brake pads in these cars, and I wouldn't trust those brake pads if they were.

I am not arguing against competition, I am saying it would be nice if all these cars inter-operated seamlessly, co-ordinating with eachother or centrally rather than each car having a different set of parameters trying to figure every other car out on the fly.

If the goal is safety then a wild west with every company setting standards for their own projects isn't going to be the best approach. If the goal is profit then Yee-Haa let the gold rush begin!

There are some real problems with centralized systems. The obvious one is that if the centralized system goes down, things would become very, very bad in a very short time (thousands of cars effectively driverless, all at once...yikes).

Making each car responsible for its own collision avoidance is a lot more robust. If the sensors fail in one car, the others can take corrective action. For maximum safety, you'd also want the cars to be running different (but equally good) software, so you don't run into the type of situation where (e.g.) they all go nuts because the programmer didn't account for leap years or whatever.