Google’s Driverless Car

Every day or so I get an email from a friend celebrating the wonderful innovation of Google’s driverless car.  I just responded to one:

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but this does very little to take us in the direction of sustainable transportation.  Looking at this from 50,000 feet, we still have what we did 75 years ago: a 4,000-pound hunk of steel that burns a fossil fuel that’s growing ever-scarcer and more environmentally unfriendly by the day–with an average of 15% efficiency.  This hunk of steel is parked an average of 23 hours a day, and carries an average of 0.25 passengers during the one hour it’s used daily. 

And we’re to believe that the most important innovation, during this time when humankind is just now realizing that consuming fossil fuels is devastating our planet is…..getting rid of the driver???  How about getting rid of the gasoline?  Or the car?  The driverless car is good news for the oil companies and the auto OEMs (imagine that…), but it’s certainly not for the remaining seven billion of us.