I like the approach of leveraging existent automotive safety technology and using the smartphone to be a meta controller - Siri/gps style telling your car what to do and letting the car take care of the car stuff. But perhaps Windows 8 is a better option!

That's a good point, Ms. Launchpad -- if the car has robust safety routines then your iPhone could just be in charge of telling the car which route to take based on the address the user entered into a GPS app. The phone's other main responsibility would be interfacing with the audio system to play music while the car takes you to your destination :)

Truth. I believe Dr Jun Jo has more complex vision system integrations up his sleeve but the music integration is essential.

The good news is, there have been no crashes in all of the Google self-driving car tests.

So that's promising.