The car wanted its human driver to retake the wheel, since this particular model wasn’t designed to merge lanes. If we ignored its command a third time, I wondered, would it pull over and start beating us like an angry dad from the front seat? Better to not find out.

No car is truly autonomous yet, so I didn’t expect Google’s car to drive entirely by itself. But several car companies — such as Audi, BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Volkswagen, and others — already have models and prototypes today with a surprising degree of driver-assistance automation. We can see “robot” or automated cars (what others have called “autonomous cars”, “driverless cars”, etc.), coming in our rear-view mirror, and they are closer than they appear.

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Why would we want cars driving themselves and bossing us around? For one thing, it could save a lot of lives. Traffic accidents kill about 32,000 people every year in America alone. That’s about 88 deaths per day in the U.S., or one victim every 15 minutes — nearly triple the rate of firearm homicides.

If all goes well, computer-driven cars could help prevent these accidents by having much faster reflexes, making consistently sound judgments, not getting road-rage or being drunk, and so on. They simply wouldn’t be as flawed as humans are.

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