I missed autonomous flying part. While autonomous driving is difficult problem autonomous flying could be even more difficult one. First flying is still noisy and residents living around airports expect airplanes to be quiet. Right away it rules out any new possibilities of urban airports and dashes all dreams of landing next to the office or house. Second is the safety factor that is extremely important in aviation. We still tolerate 30 thousand or so auto deaths per year in US but a single plane crash with a few fatalities makes news every time. Autonomous flying has to be extremely safe. Third autonomous flying has to be integrated into current airspace system. We still use voice communications to control air traffic and it seems quite difficult to imagine how autonomous flying could be integrated into that. Finally all navigation nowadays depends on GPS. We assume that it is 100% reliable and ubiquitous but it is not always so. Outages happen and accuracy sometimes suffers as well. Aviation has its expensive workarounds but I have yet to see anything about outage handling in autonomous flying. Maybe we just have too few real pilots.
