Riiiighht.

> traveling at 120, 150 mph. The speed doesn't matter.

What about pedestrians? Or an animal, such as a moose, that wanders, or bounds, onto the roadway from the nearby forest? Even an autonomous vehicle, even a group of autonomous vehicles traveling as a well coordinated group, need to be able to stop for the person/moose, or they risk killing their occupant or that person. (or the moose.) The top speed will be dependent on how far you can clear around the vehicle. (A quick Google says a speed of 150mph has a stopping distance for a car of a fifth of mile!)

> in 15 to 20 years — at the latest

That is, by 2037, there will be no vehicles that aren't fully autonomous. It won't happen. Even if the technology manages to progress that far, I doubt society is capable of that kind of rapid deprecation, even if we limit it to just the mainland US.

> Everyone will have five years to get their car off the road or sell it for scrap or trade it on a module.

Such legislation is going to be terrible for the individual; how are you going to propose that people make such a selfless trade, because in my experience, they'll never do it. For some people, you're going to legislate away their current means of transport, require them to start paying either for a new vehicle or for the cost of renting one (through a provider, e.g., Uber, counts as renting), and expect them to be fine with it, when for some folks, this might be hugely financially harmful?

> That is the death knell for companies such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Audi.

Seems to me like they could easily pivot to making luxury cars (which isn't really a pivot?); want a decent ride? $X. Want nice ride? $Y, where Y > X. There will still be people who want to go from point A to point B, and other people who want to do so in style.

> computer terminals with full connectivity.

No, there will be WiFi. Maybe. And unless we make big improvements to mobile connectivity (which in 20 years, hopefully we will), it must be limited by that.

> This transition will be largely complete in 20 years.

That would be nice, but I just don't see us going from "I can't buy a fully autonomous vehicle" to "manually cars are illegal" in 20 years.

I'm still also curious about a few aspects of (what I know are hypothetical, since nothing is on the market yet) autonomous vehicles:

* Will it bend the law, particular during the transition when there is a mix of human and computer driven vehicles? I, as a human, will regularly bend the absolute letter of the law to keep myself and others on the road safe: e.g., to avoid hazards, to allow a motorcycle to lane-split, because I don't believe the fool next to me will remain in his lane, etc. I.e., I'd rather be alive than right, as the old saying goes.)

* Navigation of a car is sometimes a hideously complex thing. E.g., I need to stop on a long road trip. I might not know where, yet, but we need to take the next exit. Today's mapping apps have always, in my experience as a user, failed terribly here: searching for something always shows results in a X mile radius around you; this includes useless results that are behind me, or completely irrelevant due to being hard to get to.