While it is impressive that cars have been developed that are self-driving and therefore autonomous, they are, in fit and function, ultimately in their look and purpose, still cars, with four wheels, an engine to drive that car, brakes, and so on and so forth. That is to say, while cars whether still driven by humans or not, have advanced considerably so that they are now able to aid the driver of the vehicle by informing the driver of hazards or making adjustments on the fly, or becoming self-driving, they are still basically just more intelligent cars, so that if these truly are to be the new cars of the future in our brave new world, they sure do look similar to what has already come before, and aren't really a quantum leap forward, but at best, an integral improvement, not wholly unexpected, and not really all that.
This would seem to signify, when it comes to transportation, the best way to attack the real issue of people moving, is to throw out all the old playbooks, completely, and to thereby utilize our minds to come up with alternative ways to transport people from one place to another, recognizing that most people when they travel, do so alone, and don't need much more than a backpack worth of stuff to carry with them, and thereby to carefully look at all of the various forms of transportation that are being utilized or imagined today and see if there is truly something that would be transferrable to people that would not have to rely on the friction of a tire on a road in order to do so, but instead, be frictionless.
In fact, there are frictionless trains, and these trains are able to travel at speeds well in excess of 200 mph, through the process of magnetic levitation technology. This magnetic levitation technology most definitely works and while today it is utilized for trains that are built to run on specific magnetic tracks, it does not take a real stretch of the imagination to picture that in one form or another, in one way or another, this could be transferrable as a replacement for passenger cars, if an integrated effort on a coordinated massive scale was put forth by governmental and private enterprise, for this truly would change the transportation game in a dramatic way, making for a world in which the reliance on fossil fuels for our transportation needs would be reduced considerably, and replaced by magnetism and electricity.
The important point to get out of all this is that the automation of cars doesn't really resolve any of our issues in regards to traffic congestion, or our carbon footprint, while they may indeed make us safer, the upshot is that the advance of automated cars or semi-automated cars will ultimately lead to more cars being on the road. This would seem to signify, that our future transportation needs should take into account that the days of utilizing transportation that involves road friction, should be set aside, and replaced by transportation that is frictionless, which would mean that those vehicles would be quieter, lighter, smaller, and significantly more energy efficient.