Here’s a thought: What if you could gain back an hour of productivity during your daily rush hour commutes while dramatically increasing the fuel efficiency of your car? According to the Center for Automotive Research, traffic congestion cost Americans a whopping 4.8 billion hours of time and 1.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel in 2011.

Enter the self-driving car, and the possibility to eliminate most urban congestion while allowing travelers to email, text, call and surf the Web safely at 60 MPH. What was once only an idea steeped in science fiction is now on the drawing tables of Google and GM. But before you swap your keys for your laptop, there are a few hurdles the industry needs to clear.

There are at least three high-level challenges, or “areas for investigation,” that the automotive industry needs to work on before we start seeing acceptable driverless cars:

1. The Handover

The first challenge is about the “handover” from car to driver — how does the car give back control and the user accept this control while moving? There will be situations on the road that driverless cars will not be able to negotiate — driving conditions that require human intuition above and beyond the situation awareness the car has through its network of sensors and radar.

When the car needs to relinquish control, the driver needs to be able to react and assume their new role within a matter of seconds. Obviously handing over control of a car to someone immersed in a video or book will create a very hazardous situation. Because time is the greatest factor in this operation, it makes how the car gives back control to a driver and how the driver accepts it one of the most pressing challenges to autonomous vehicles.

2. Mental Model Problem

The next challenge involves our understanding of a vehicle that is fairly intelligent but not yet fully independent. Three specific areas within this challenge are safety, enjoyment and trust.

The safety of all occupants in a vehicle is a given concern — we want the vehicle to get us from point A to point B in one piece. This is closely tied to trust — are drivers confident that the vehicle will take them where they need to go, that it will hand over control when needed and will make any necessary detours while in transit.

Lastly, the enjoyment that comes with the sense of empowerment of controlling a vehicle yourself is something that many drivers are not ready to renounce. For many sixteen-year-olds getting a driver’s license is a rite of passage. But the demographics are changing, and so are attitudes towards driving. In an age of mobility-on-demand, the act of driving will be a distraction from smart phones and video games, not vice versa.

3. Personalization

Driverless cars will adapt “actively” to drivers. The car will become an extension of yourself as it learns your driving habits. Are you very fuel conscious and drive as eco-friendly as possible? Do you like to leave an extra car-length between the car in front of you on the highway? Or better yet, what accent would you like to have read your emails and text messages to you while driving? These personal details can be logged to adjust the braking, steering, fuel injection and acceleration.

Of course, this personal data will all be stored in the block box onboard the car. Worried about your privacy? How about when insurance companies can see how fast you were going in that school zone….

OEMs have yet to address basic questions of how the industry will agree or compete, how they will allow transportability of data collected inside a car and how they will adjust their driverless cars to a future generation suffering from information overload.

While advancements in sensor, DSRC and radar technology march forward, we can only hope that the corresponding legislation, investment in V2V and V2X infrastructure and consumer adoption keeps pace.

What are your thoughts on autonomous vehicles? Would you buy a self-driving car?

Davide Santo is Safety & Chassis Business MCU Operation manager at Freescale Semiconductor.