Latin America's self-driving cars

As a recent Wired article indicates, self-driving cars are a reality. Google has already logged 140,000 miles of driving by computer. Go read the article.

I was thinking about this article as I drove down the street here in Managua. Taxi drivers swerve and stop without signaling. At least twice I've seen drivers with bottles of rum in their hand. People blow through red lights when they can, in fact, there is a whole social norm as to when it is or isn't acceptable. Horse-drawn or ox-drawn carts are a regular feature. So are police checkpoints. Vendors stand in the middle of the road selling phone cases and trying to clean your windshield. The road conditions are terrible with potholes, unmarked speed bumps and, during rainy season, lots of standing water and mud.

Technologically, the software, hardware and computer systems to get self-driving cars in Latin America is at most two decades away and could be here as soon as the next ten years. From a social engineering standpoint, I'm not sure. Sure, Google's cars can drive the highways of California and the local streets of Nevada. But could they really handle Managua, Mexico City or rural Brazil?

Do self-driving cars adapt to the developing world or does the developing world adapt to self-driving cars?

Technologically, there will certainly be questions that passengers will want answered before the cars can drive down here. How does the car manage so many potholes, mud and obstacles on the ground? Can the car drive itself off the paved road and across 10 kilometers of bumps and rocks to get to a beach resort? How can the car differentiate between a windshield washer and a potential carjacker with a gun. Or, more extreme, between a military checkpoint and a criminal ambush?

I'm certain most Latin American policymakers have not thought through the sorts of regulations that will be necessary. Most importantly, does someone always have to be at the wheel to override the car, or can the car drive completely autonomously?

Then again, think optimistically about this. The number of deaths in vehicles in Latin America is very, very high, much worse than the US. Perhaps self-driving cars finally make a dent in the traffic deaths here by making better choices than humans. And perhaps some innovative Latin American country can serve as a test ground and get investments from car companies, improving the software for the cars by providing obstacles that most engineers in the US would never see or even imagine.