Self-Driving Cars May End Gasoline Era

By 2025, self-driving cars could lead to a steep decline in fossil fuels - and in personal car ownership.  Smart electric vehicles will pick you up, drop you off, and mostly look after themselves.  A realistic scenario?

In 2014, in the USA alone, cars traveled an estimated 2,926 billion miles (4,740 billion kilometers) - not always safely.  During that year, 32,675 people lost their lives in traffic accidents, and a much larger number were injured.

This meant around $200 billion (175 billion euros) in insurance claims and another $670 billion of uncompensated losses in pain and suffering, lost work-time, damaged gear, emergency services costs and other economic losses, according to figures from the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

That works out to about 29.6 cents per mile," said Brad Templeton, a Canadian expert on autonomous vehicles, who was in Berlin for the Singularity University Germany Summit.  That's more than two and a half times what people spend on fuel per mile on average, given US gasoline prices of $2.14 a gallon.

"Cars are a huge health and environmental hazard, and accidents generate enormous costs.  But that's going to change, because robots don't drink and drive, they don't turn into seniors with slow reflexes, and they don't screw up because of inexperience.  They're going to drive incomparably more safely than people can."

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