When starting this forum, I did go with the phrase “self driving car” for the title. But I used “auto automobile” for the domain name, as some people call it an autonomous car. I think it’ll be interesting to see what term ultimately sticks, or whether there will continue to be several different terms.
It seems that when searching for “self driving cars”, most of the results are about the Google car. Also included is the wikipedia page on the topic “autonomous car”. On that page, they also make mention of the other common terms including “driverless car”, “driver-free car”, and “robot car”.
Obviously this technology is still in its infancy. I’m fairly certain the terminology will evolve as the technology matures. Already there are many different aspects of machine assisted driving (adaptive cruise control, lane wandering alerts, automated parking) which ultimately may mean that there will be all different types of automated cars. Some cars already offer these basic assists, and my guess is within the next few years there will be some publicly available cars on the road with far more sophisticated assists.
If you have thoughts on the terminology and why some terms are better than others, feel free to share in this thread.