LIDAR footage form Google self driving car:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiwVMrTLUWg&feature=youtu.be&t=9m5s
The little Google cars are driving in city street conditions, driving <30mph, but highway/freeway speed conditions, no. In my mind, cars can safely drive at high speeds (100mph or more) in open highways but under normal large city traffic conditions, again, no. Vehicles will need to be able to communicate with each other from a distance in order to be safe and, unless we put communication devices on foot/bicycle/skateboard traffic, autonomous vehicles will not work.
The examples given in the TED video are a tiny tip of the iceberg for problems to overcome on roadways.
With all of that said, when all of this autonomous driverless vehicles was first proposed/discussed, my thoughts at the time was, again, too many challenges to overcome to be safe. The only way that I thought that this could become a reality is to create a train type of roadway that had redundant communications posts setup every few hundred meters on a roadway and all vehicle communicated with each other so that the onboard computer could fall in line with other vehicles moving in the same direction, at the same speed, like a train. The 'train' of vehicles could then achieve high speeds, and the onboard, pre-programmed destination computer could coordinate with other vehicles in the 'train' to allow the vehicle to navigate to it's destination. As one commenter above said, this roadway would be strictly for autonomous use, and once the vehicle breaks out of this autonomous roadway, the human driver would need to take over. The logistics for this type of roadway/vehicle are also a very large problem. The vehicle maintenance for this type of vehicle would have to be regulated to a cost and would be so expensive for all situations that it becomes non-viable. The roadway itself would need a computer every few hundred meters as a traffic regulator to communicate with all the vehicle on its' roads. This means tax dollars to accomplish this, which escalates the cost of the system. There would need to be certified safety technicians/engineers to maintain all of this equipment, which escalates the cost.
In my humble opinion, the autonomous vehicle is too costly and premature. In fact, unless there are tremendous breakthroughs in technology that will lower costs and raise the AI to much higher levels, autonomous vehicles are not ready for public use.
The airplane industry back in the beginnings struggled with this problem, and eventually airplanes became safer to use for transporting people. That took 50 years to accomplish before planes were carrying large numbers of travelers. Planes today are much safer, statistically, for travel than any ground vehicle (not sure about trains). The problem with airplanes, when one falls out of the sky, hundreds of people die in one felled swoop, which makes flying seem unsafe to some, but when you look at the numbers, planes win the safety race, hands down. In 50 years, some may look back to now and marvel at the crude methods that we are currently using to navigate our roads, but much more work will have to be done in order to get to that point.