– Eliza, DISCOVER online news editor

Think it through a little farther – it’d be pretty pointless to have a system that required everyone to go the same places at the same time. It’d be more like: You drive onto the freeway and cruise along on your own until you hook up with one of the constantly-circulating “trains”. Then you pull into the train lane, hit a button, and your car links up with the train. You run with it as far as you need to, then when your exit’s coming up you hit your off button and exit on your own, and the cars in the train adjust to fill your spot. Seems good, although Jay Fox’s point about condition and performace looks like a significant obstacle – presumably, if the lead driver had to slam on his brakes, there would be more potential for carnage with the closely-spaced robocars, especially if one of them somehow failed mechanically. It’ll be interesting to follow the studies to see whether that potential flaw would outweigh the potential safety improvement of eliminating a bunch of possible human error in day-to-day driving.

This seems like bad implementation of a good idea. Why not have chips embedded in the roadways that the vehicles “read” to get where they’re going without human interaction? The vehicle controls when to get on and off the freeway and communicates with vehicles already on the freeway to make sure there is room, speed is coordinated, etc.

The biggest problem I can forsee with such a system is the fact that it must assume similar performance characteristics for all vehicles in the train. Put a car with bad brakes near the rear, and problems could add up quickly in emergencies. Of course, if all vehicles had on-board computers talking to each other, perhaps speed and spacing would be automatically adjusted accordingly. Each car would have to be capable of monitoring it’s own performance characteristics and reporting same to “the hive.”

This new system would effectively control every aspect of your driving, from ensuring the distance between your car and the cars around you is a safe one, ensuring cars are sped up, and slowed down accordingly, that you’re driving at the safe speed, that your car is safely in the middle of the road, etc. You can effectively just sit there, and do nothing during the car ride.

Re: Andy. It will be necessary to modify this system a little bit, perhaps they can leave a smaller distance in between cars, which makes lane-weaving impossible? Or perhaps, they can employ this system in specific lanes, (like the HOV systems).