[robogimp]

I am not arguing against competition, I am saying it would be nice if all these cars inter-operated seamlessly, co-ordinating with eachother or centrally rather than each car having a different set of parameters trying to figure every other car out on the fly.

If the goal is safety then a wild west with every company setting standards for their own projects isn't going to be the best approach. If the goal is profit then Yee-Haa let the gold rush begin!

[Turing_Machine]

There are some real problems with centralized systems. The obvious one is that if the centralized system goes down, things would become very, very bad in a very short time (thousands of cars effectively driverless, all at once...yikes).

Making each car responsible for its own collision avoidance is a lot more robust. If the sensors fail in one car, the others can take corrective action. For maximum safety, you'd also want the cars to be running different (but equally good) software, so you don't run into the type of situation where (e.g.) they all go nuts because the programmer didn't account for leap years or whatever.