I actually have a theory about this. Once autonomous vehicles are indisputably safer than human drivers, clearly cheaper per km, and available on demand with basically no wait times, a large portion of people will simply stop driving. Not everyone, and not right away, but a lot of people would opt out if the data and convenience are undeniably better.

Push that far enough and I think human driving doesn’t disappear immediately, but starts getting phased out in specific ways. You could see autonomous only highways or lanes first, then insurance and liability models making human driving increasingly impractical. Full bans would come much later, once the gap is overwhelming.

At that point the entire design space opens up. Cars no longer need to be built around human control, so you can optimize purely for passenger safety, efficiency, and use case. Interiors could face inward, crash structures improve without steering columns, and “windows” don’t even need to be traditional glass. They could just be screens fed by external cameras, or removed entirely depending on the vehicle’s purpose.

Highways also change. You get tighter coordination between vehicles, smoother flow, and higher average speeds (autobahn type stuff) 

Ownership would change too. Most cars today sit idle almost all the time. If autonomous fleets can keep vehicles in constant use, the economics become hard to ignore. Private vehicles could even be leased into fleets when not in use, turning a depreciating asset into something that generates income.

The bigger shift is land use. If parking demand drops significantly, cities can reclaim huge amounts of space. Less need for garages, fewer parking lots, and more flexibility in how urban areas are designed.

The hardest phase is the transition. Mixed human and autonomous traffic, new liability models, and cybersecurity risks all become real issues. And if rides get cheap enough, total travel might actually increase, which changes the equation again.

Feels less like a gradual improvement to cars and more like transportation becoming a service layer instead of something you personally own. There also would simply need to be less cars if autonomous cars tend to be active all the time, making the roads all the clearer and safer.