cars that drive themselves!

Someone is in the WaPo suggesting that cars will drive themselves by 2020, but the article tosses out two sentences that indicate this is not as cool of a scifi future as we've all been imagining. Two interesting implications:

1) Privacy. The US and European manufacturers are supporting ad hoc networks for cars on the road to exchange information, whereas Japan is supporting a central repository for particular locations. There are some interoperability issues here, but more interesting to me are the privacy issues -- the US/European system strikes me as significantly less of a privacy threat, since ad hoc networks are just that: ad hoc and non-persistent. I actually suspect in a rousing turn-around of events that at some point our government will start quietly lobbying our auto manufacturers to switch to the Japanese system, if not advantaging that system overtly.

2) Environmentalism & Public Transportation. "Drivers will be able to work, read, watch films or even sleep while their cars are driven for them. 'It will be like sitting on a bus or a train,' says Ekmark." Now, I use buses and trains in order to avoid the scary traffic. But if my car drives itself (and does so presumably more safely than the bus driver drives me today) and I can sleep or read in my own car amongst my own dirt for that time instead.... I'd be very much inclined to stop using public transportation. (Especially if they somehow fixed the parking problem too.) This has major implications for the budgets of the public transport companies and for the mobility of people who can't afford personal vehicles. It also puts the movement toward carpooling and mass transit for environmental purposes back a number of years....

So, I'm curious how much we actually stand to gain from these magic cars (how many fewer accidents? anything else?) vs. what we stand to lose (our privacy? our jobs? mobility of the lower classes? our planet?). I'd love to see someone do a breakdown of this so I know whether my fears are greatly exaggerated.... And I'm sad that the perfect scifi future doesn't look so perfect now that I'm an adult and it's becoming more real.