That kind of work doesn't sound like it would require driving on public roads, though, at least not much.

So I don't own the land myself. And I don't work on a singular piece of land. I would volunteer around fires and I would volunteer to do tree planting all over my state so I travel all over. I actually live in a city.

I like manual transmissions, too, but if an automatic can do the job eve nearly as well most of the time, it seems like fair price to pay.

I don't think it does. The manual transmission gives me other advantages because since I'm driving a much smaller truck I can maneuver it into tighter parts of the forest.

Ten years ago, people balked at the idea that a car could drive itself on public roads. Technology keeps advancing, at an incredible rate. There are not many tasks that humans have set out to build a machine to do, and failed. Heck, the very first large-scale self-driving vehicle competition took place off-road.

That's nice. I am very familiar with the realities of working with this exact data and the amount of qa/qc necessary and the amount of failure necessary. That's why I think it will work well on public roads because there will be a well worked out infrastructure. And infrastructure that I actually think is possible right now with our current level of Technology. But a car unto itself?

Why? The rise of car sharing shows that we're already moving away from cars as a status symbol. Fewer people just "go for a drive" anymore, and people are buying cars less and less for the looks and more and more for safety ratings anf fuel efficiency.

We're selfish. Even if you are owning one less car that you are splitting between you and your wife. The amount of time that car is on the road is about the same as the combined time of your two cars on the road.

Again, why? Even if this were the case, self-driving cars make the roads safer for bicycles, pedestrians, all sorts of people.

Because the public has never been too keen on expanding infrastructure for bike, pedestrian and public transit. It might make it safer but overall the infrastructure is still shitty. Yeah, it's safer but due to the street layouts that favor cars a trip takes a mile that has a linear distance of one eighth of a mile.

Not as well. Consider this; with an entirely self-driving car populace, there is now little to no need to stop at intersections. This has been successfully modeled. But it ONLY works with exclusively self-driving cars. Consider that self-driving cars don;t just often move from out of the way of emergency vehicles; they MUST. Now, we can remove the speed limit from emergency vehicles (yes, they have a speed limit too), and they can get to emergencies faster.

No I think it's possible as well. Even with cars piloted by people. We can easily attach a sensor onto any car piloted by people that alert the communication data infrastructure of the self-driving Network to calculate and factor in that car into the infrastructure. Speed, weight, size etc can all be calculated and process into the database. It would be no different than when the self-driving car Network make accommodations for pedestrians on the street and bike riding alongside it.