I'm in the home stretch of a long international trip -- photos to follow -- but I speak tomorrow at Lincoln Center on how computers (and robocars) will change the worlds of finance. In the meantime, Google's announcement last month has driven a lot of news in the Robocar space worthy of reporting.

On the lighter side, this video from the Conan O'Brien show highlights the issues around people's deep fear of being injured by machines. While the video is having fun, this is a real issue that will dominate the news when the first accidents and injuries happen. I cover that in detail in my article about accidents but the debate will be a major one.

Nissan announced last year that it would sell cars in 2020. Now that Tesla has said 2016, Google has said civilians will be in their small car within a year and Volvo has said the same will happen in Sweden by 2017, Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn has said they might do it 2 years earlier.

As various locations rush to put in robocar laws, in Europe they are finally getting around to modifying the Vienna convention treaty, which required a human driver. However, the new modifications, driven by car companies, still call for a steering wheel that a driver can use to take over (as do some of the US state laws.) These preclude Google's new design, but perhaps with a bit of advance warning, this can be fixed. Otherwise, changing it again will be harder. Perhaps the car companies -- none of whom have talked about anything like Google's car with no controls -- will be happy with that.

The urban test course at the University of Michigan, announced not very long ago, is almost set to open -- things are moving fast, as they will need to if Michigan is to stay in the race. Google's new prototype, by the way, is built in Michigan. Google has not said who but common speculation names not a major car company, but one of their big suppliers.

The Ernst & Young auto research lab (in Detroit) issued a very Detroit style forecast for autonomous vehicles which said their widespread use was 2 decades away. Not too surprising for such a group. Consultants are notoriously terrible at predictions for exponential technology. Their bad smartphone predictions are legendary (and now erased, of course.) A different study predicts an $87 billion market -- but the real number is much larger than that.

This article where top car designers critique Google's car illustrates my point from last week how people with car company experience are inclined to just not get it. But at the same time some of the automotive press do get it.