Could driverless cars save lives? Yes, but it may take a long road to get there. "Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are never drunk or tired or inattentive," says Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Julian De Freitas. "We expect that they will make roads truly much safer." In fact, De Freitas and colleagues recently argued in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that adopting driverless vehicles on a broad scale could improve global health on a level equivalent to the introduction of penicillin or vaccines.

Almost half of Americans say they would never buy a fully self driving car, a new survey has found. The huge blow to the industry comes after rocky trials that have seen multiple accidents, including a self-driving Uber vehicle that killed a pedestrian in the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle in March. The Cox Automotive Evolution of Mobility Study found that consumer awareness of driverless vehicles has skyrocketed - but that people still want to be able to drive themselves. The research found 84 per cent want to have the option to drive themselves even in a self-driving vehicle, compared to 16 per cent who would feel comfortable letting an autonomous vehicle drive them without the option of being able to take control. It also found 84 per cent want to have the option to drive themselves even in a self-driving vehicle, compared to 16 per cent who would feel comfortable letting an autonomous vehicle drive them without the option of being able to take control.

One is the home of America's automotive industry, a heavily regulated, ultra-conservative sector focusing on high-volume, low-margin sales. They are also in competition to own what some are calling the next personal computing platform: the car. The recent focus is less the embedded systems that run vehicles – Linux won that battle – and more the data connections to deliver so-called "infotainment" to those inside and beam diagnostic data back to the manufacturer. Gartner reckons on a five-fold increase in such units globally by 2020 to 61 million. With those units come opportunities. Now, the sale isn't just about the car; it's about the subscription revenue that you can garner from apps and online services.