I'm with you in thinking that this technology will be quite revolutionary. When I was in elementary school, the school year before the moon landing, my classmates and I made a time capsule, filling it with our predictions of the world of 2001. The time capsule was opened that year (I was overseas at the time, so I missed the big ceremony for that), and our predictions could then be tested against reality. We all recognized that exhaust emissions of cars would have to be reduced, and they were, but by incremental improvements in Otto-cycle engine designs rather than by switching to electric cars, as we predicted.

What we didn't anticipate was truly personal, individual vehicles that could drive themselves even within within twenty years of 2001. I thought that the world would move toward more fixed-path public transportation solutions, like the monorails that always featured in 1960s visions of the future.

The comments below your comment on use cases are very interesting. This whole subthread is food for thought. My thought, as a married man with three children still at home, and one grown child in another state who might still join us on family trips from time to time, is that we will probably buy ONE more car that isn't self-driving, to replace the older of our two cars in the next few years, and then ONE self-driving car to be my wife's main commuting car, with her stuff stashed inside. For all other trips, we will subscribe to an on-call car service, which will surely be cheaper per use than full ownership of a second car. The car service cars can be parked all over town for instant availability. They will be intelligently dispatched by algorithms that balance speed of arrival with passenger preferences such as whether or not the car has child safety seats, whether or not the passenger prefers to work or to relax with a great sound system during the drive, and so on. I greatly look forward to this lifestyle. I substitute a lot of walking and bicycling for car driving already, and just knowing that eventually (not REAL soon) all the cars sharing the road and street with me will have competent robot drivers is a huge improvement.

The Wall Street Journal article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and That's a Good Thing"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044352490457765...

from a few months ago has more about the economy-changing dynamics of driverless cars. I can't wait--but I'll observe the speed limit while I'm driving as I attempt to wait.

AFTER EDIT: Responding to comments elsewhere in this interesting thread, why I think Google Maps will probably be licensed into most self-driving car packages, even if the hardware is built mostly by other companies, is that Google Maps is relentless in adding data to its geographic database.

SEP 6 2012, Alexis Madrigal's column in The Atlantic, shared previously to HN, "How Google Builds Its Maps—and What It Means for the Future of Everything"

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/how-go...

September 27, 2012, David Pogue's column in the New York Times: "What Makes Google’s Maps So Good"

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/27/what-makes-googles...

The Google Street View photography of my former neighborhood in Panchiao, Taiwan is PHENOMENAL, and data like that are being gathered all over the world. If I like, I can take a photo in 3-D view with my Nexus 4 phone, GPS geolocation turned on, and add data to the database any time. Generally, any time anyone is on a drive with a Google device turned on, Google gets some of the data that helps it predict current driving times for differing routes to the destination--an enormously helpful feature of Google Maps for drives during rush hour in the Twin Cities.