There seems to be suspicion among consumers about possible negative consequences of driverless vehicles, that the state might be able to control absolutely where vehicles can go and not go, and also whether a particular human can ride at all. Is there anything sinister in the advent of driverless cars and trucks?

This is absolutely the case and is foreseen. You have probed into this previously in the discussion of the Global Positioning System [GPS] and the increasing reliance of humans on the technology to get them to a desired destination. This erodes the building of a cognitive map by the individuals themselves where they have a good sense of where things are, how to get there, the best route to take, the distance involved, and so on. When people rely on an electronic signal with the intelligence to do something, and do not have the parallel ability within their own brain, they are at the mercy of whatever might happen. So this is akin to most modern technological advances that by making things effortless they erode the skill of everyone, because the machines can do it faster and cheaper and often better. And humans become less and less capable of anything. No one asks "What will we do when the satellite signal is blocked, how will we find our way, especially if there is an emergency situation unfolding?" That is the worst time to have such an outage because then there will be chaos, with people trying frantically to reach destinations, and not have the technology to lean on. The same applies to having only driverless vehicles. They depend on having the GPS guidance to know where and when to turn and without it are useless. So all transportation is now unavailable given a breakdown in the communication links. So this is going from bad to worse. It is not to say this will happen on a large scale but the potential is nicely created. When the technological approach is embraced on a wide scale, people will be surrendering their freedom yet again. And this has happened over and over and over where people are quite dependent on the cyber world to make everything happen and in its absence nothing can happen.