They are not going to come so soon, the fully automated ones. I have watched with interest for years the Google Self Driving Car project and they release very little actual information about the stage they are at and the problems they are solving.

No. If the only potential customers are huge car companies, they're going to prefer to build their own self-driving car tech to paying a high price for Google's.

If self-driving cars are a huge success as a technology, it won't be from Google. Google is incredibly bad at developing things where humans need to be involved. (See also: Try to get customer service for most Google products.)

Google has basically glossed over the fact that their cars fail every 1,560 miles and focused on their "1.4 million miles driven" figure. They're pushing an agenda of eliminating the human driver from their prototypes, even though their cars would be incredibly dangerous without them.

Meanwhile, other companies are focusing on ways to make the UX of self-driving cars safe and comforting for humans to interact with: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3054330/innovation-by-design/the...