Human drivers are woefully inefficient, stabbing the gas and the brakes all the time instead of grooving into a smooth cruise. Efficiency improves further when the cars route themselves as a group, like human drivers can do today with services like Waze, which give directions based on road and traffic conditions to avoid congestion.
Add to that cutting emissions by going electric, and you can see how a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory would find that robot cars, powered from a central grid, could reduce taxi emissions by 94% compared to today’s gas-powered, human-steered cabs.
Dispatches From The Front 