The benefits of electronics
All this does not mean that the Adas (and then the fully automatic autonomous driving) also bring benefits. There are no precise and complete field measurements yet, but something shows.
For example, in a recent seminar on autonomous driving organized by Volvo, the president of the Italian subsidiary said that, since the Swedish company adopted the automatic braking system, the sales of replacement hoods (parts very exposed to rear-end collisions) they are halving year after year.
Will we really go faster?
Of course, car manufacturers must also send messages to those who appreciate speed and / or driving pleasure. So they hint at the possibility of raising the limits when there will be autonomous driving, because accidents will decrease.
But this would only happen after the disappearance of human-guided vehicles, given the difficult coexistence between the two. And at that time we will move almost only with the electric, which has high performance, but not exploitable for long if you want to make the batteries last long enough. It will improve, but there will remain the need to go slowly to reduce electricity consumption, cutting the CO2 emissions that cause climate change.
Rather, automatic driving should reduce accidents more and more, almost to zero (with the queues they cause). Furthermore, the dialogue between on-board automatic driving and smart road should make traffic flow more smoothly on the most congested sections or with construction sites, eliminating even small differences in behavior between the various human drivers that slow the flow (as in a pipe with many eddies).