Farfetched as the idea might sound, researchers continue to make impressive progress on the development of autonomous motor vehicles, observers say. Since 2009, Google’s self-driving cars have gone

more than 1 million miles in “autonomous mode,” according to a 2015 Google report. The company has expanded these tests to Washington state and Texas and is reportedly in talks with officials in the U.K. about running trials there as well. Similar research projects are under way in China, Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden, to name a few countries. Meanwhile, Audi, BMW, Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Toyota and Volvo are all testing — and in some cases even releasing — cars with self-driving or self-parking features.

Sooner or later, cars will start pulling into mall parking lots with nobody behind the wheel, predicts William Hecht, COO of Westfield U.S. “If you are a believer that the arrival of driverless cars is a matter of when, not if,” Hecht said, “then how do you actually start to change your [shopping center] design now?” A logical first step, observers say, is to begin imagining how the transition to driverless vehicles might play out in mall parking lots and entranceways in the years to come.

The first changes will probably be the result of consumer adoption of so-called self-parking technology. Even before fully autonomous vehicles are ubiquitous on the roads, experts say, self-parking cars will enable shoppers to pull up to mall entrances, hop out of their cars and command them to park. When ready to leave, they will use smartphones or key fobs to summon their vehicles back, much as one might summon a dog. Such “virtual valet” functionality is closer to being reality than some might suspect, says Raj Rajkumar, an autonomous-vehicle researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. “We demonstrated virtual-valet capability in 2010 at one of our active parking lots here at the university,” he said. “It’s what I like to call an incremental-automation feature. I believe it will be viable commercially in the next five or 10 years.” BMW exhibited its Remote Valet Parking Assistant at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas. A driver exited a BMW i3 electric car and used a Samsung watch to order the vehicle to park itself. 

But if self-parking technology proves to be popular, the increase in pickups and drop-offs at mall entranceways could create more congestion in these areas, observers say. If fully autonomous vehicles start hitting the roads as well — Google, for one, says it aims to make driverless cars commercially available by 2020 — this could compound the congestion at mall pickup and drop-off points even further, Rajkumar says. In the years to come, he explains, more people will forgo personal car ownership and rely instead on fleets of driverless taxis. “Right at home, you would basically say: ‘Hey, I need to go to the mall. Come pick me up,’” Rajkumar said. “The car comes to your home, drives you all the way to the mall and then goes off and picks up somebody else.”

As currently designed, however, mall entranceways could be poorly suited for the dramatic increase of such activity. “Mall owners have to keep in mind what happens at airports at the arrivals-and-departures curb,” Rajkumar said. “It becomes a riot at curbside.” Chaos at the curb could confuse the sensor-guided, computer-controlled vehicles, he says, slowing them down and possibly leading to gridlock. “Having friendlier curbs and structured ways of doing things — funneling in and funneling out — would help,” Rajkumar said.

Mindful of such possibilities, Westfield is quadrupling the size of its valet drop-off areas at Westfield Century City, in Los Angeles, and Westfield UTC, in San Diego, Hecht says. “At the very least, if we are providing a much better experience to our better customers even before driverless cars arrive, then fantastic,” he said. “What I don’t want is to have to rebuild in 10 years because we missed the need for this capacity.” 

Driverless cars could also create opportunities for malls — most notably by reducing the need to set aside so much valuable land for parking, experts say. Initially, the reduction in demand will come, again, from the use of self-parking cars driven onto the lot by humans, says Jeffrey Tumlin, a principal and the strategy director of San Francisco–based Nelson-Nygaard, a transportation planning firm. Imagine a mall parking lot with an area set aside for self-parking cars only. As some demos have shown, these cars will be able to park just a foot or so apart within this special lot, because space for people to open car doors will be unnecessary, Tumlin points out.

Eventually, self-parking cars will also be able to wirelessly “talk” to one another in ways that save even more space, Tumlin says. “Since the cars communicate with each other and know their precise boundaries, they can park themselves, Tetris-style,” he said, referring to the shape-matching video game. This will include having the cars park three or four deep. “When you click the button to have your car come meet you at the curb, it tells the other three cars in front of it to kindly move out of the way,” Tumlin said. Unused space accounts for more than half of a typical parking lot, he says, so landlords stand to reclaim a significant amount of acreage as this technology evolves. “When cars can self-park and communicate with each other, we will be able to cram a lot more cars into existing lots,” he said. “And this will be here sooner rather than later.”

The advent of driverless cars will most affect shopping centers in densely populated cities, Tumlin says. Urban-dwelling Millennials are already eschewing car ownership and getting around on bicycles, by mass transit and using crowd-sourced taxi services like Uber and Lyft. With fleets of driverless cars readily available, future urbanites will see even less need to own vehicles costing thousands of dollars annually for fuel, maintenance, parking and insurance, Tumlin says. “In cities, private automobile ownership will become very much akin to owning a horse, boat or airplane,” he said. “Only aficionados will own cars. What that means is that we probably now have 80 percent more parking spaces in our cities than we will need 15 years from now.”

In theory, self-driving cars could drop shoppers at urban malls and then either park some distance away or drive to new destinations to pick up other passengers. “If this were to take pressure off of parking garages and lots near urban shopping centers, it would be especially good news,” said James Cook, director of retail research for JLL. These reductions in parking demand could also create new opportunities for development — everything from the replacement of obsolete parking lots with new projects to ramping up the productivity of older malls by bringing in new uses, says consultant Glen Hiemstra, founder of Futurist.com. “It raises a lot of interesting possibilities,” Hiemstra said. “Let’s say you only need half of your parking lot. You could add retail space or bring in hotel, residential or office where suitable.” 

Hecht is already thinking about how reductions in parking space could translate into higher-density development in Westfield’s portfolio. “It could give us the ability to redevelop about 30 percent of the land area in our shopping centers in a much more intensive way,” he said. Other landlords, too, are considering the possible effects of driverless cars in the future. For its new Hill Center Brentwood mixed-use project in Nashville, Tenn., developer H.G. Hill chose to build the parking deck so that it could be converted into residential space if necessary, according to architect Angelo A. Carusi, a principal in Cooper Carry’s retail practice group. “The owner believes the driverless automobile could one day make the number of parking spaces now being provided obsolete,” Carusi said.

But change could extend well beyond parking lots and decks. These vehicles have great potential to whisk more shoppers to the mall — in particular, those who are disabled, elderly or too young to drive. In Japan researchers are exploring whether driverless cars could provide mobility to seniors who cannot drive themselves. In the Netherlands, Delft Technical University is testing an electric, driverless shuttle on public roads, and the European Union has funded a program called Citymobil2 that is now testing driverless shuttles in various EU cities. As Hiemstra sees it, shopping center landlords could also become transportation providers by offering driverless cars or shuttles. “I can imagine the largest-scale shopping centers leasing driverless cars just to circulate around,” he said. “The cars could pick people up or even deliver goods. It opens up a lot of creative possibilities.”

Technologists imagine a utopian future in which driverless cars save about 1 million lives per year by eliminating traffic fatalities the world over. Real estate executives envision a day in which they may rip up oversized parking lots and replace them with uses that are vastly more profitable. There are challenges, though, before the driverless car can actually rule the road, experts say. These challenges center on technology limitations and the need for new -regulations, as well as general uncertainty about how societies will respond to the notion of driverless cars, says Rajkumar. On the tech front, one of the biggest obstacles could hardly be more basic to driving: The sensor-guided vehicles are unable to cope with major blizzards, he points out. Indeed, even heavy rain or fog may befuddle the cars’ sensors. “Those challenges have to be overcome,” Rajkumar said. Another possible problem is one that is irritatingly ubiquitous in anything technology-related: interference from hackers. The connected cars of the future will use Wi-Fi to communicate with traffic lights, roadway signs, other vehicles and more. But these exchanges represent potential points through which hackers could gain control of a driverless vehicle, Rajkumar cautions.

The cars might also need to receive real-time information about parking-lot occupancies and layouts — data not currently available for every property. But startups such as San Francisco–based Streetline are already creating data networks that driverless vehicles could one day leverage to gain a sort of omniscience about parking availability, location, cost and more, says Kurt Buecheler, Streetline’s senior vice president of business development. In parts of Los Angeles Streetline has installed hundreds of in-pavement sensors in an effort to assemble a real-time database of parking occupancy. Relatively inexpensive overhead cameras may be employed to do the same thing, Buecheler notes.  

On the regulatory front, governments will need to draft new policies for driverless cars and eliminate statutes that are, naturally, oriented to the involvement of human drivers, observers say. The EU Citymobil2 program is reportedly studying these legal issues, and the Obama administration announced plans to spend some $4 billion on these policy challenges as well. In the U.S. in particular, the potential for the states to create a confusing hodge-podge of conflicting rules is a real concern, Rajkumar points out. Last December the California Department of Motor Vehicles proposed rules that would require drivers to be able to take control of self-driving vehicles at any time. This would, of course, thwart the plans of Google and others to create vehicles in which humans are not responsible for driving at all.

In February, however, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a letter expressing the opinion that, at least for Google’s self-driving cars, the software — and not a human being inside — should be considered the driver. Does this mean software companies would be liable in accidents involving driverless vehicles? “Negligence of the driver is the general basis for most personal-injury cases that involve motor vehicles,” said Thomas C. Regan, a shareholder in the Newark, N.J., office of national law firm LeClairRyan. “Take that away, and it forces either a product-liability case or some yet-to-be-determined alternative.” One possible alternative, Regan says, would be a compact along the lines of the workers’ compensation rules that prevail in some states. 

In other words, lawmakers could clear the road for driverless cars by limiting the amount of litigation people could file over accidents involving the vehicles, Regan says.

Driverless cars will also need to win the confidence of the public, Rajkumar says. In a poll of nearly 2,000 U.S. registered voters conducted this year by research firm Morning Consult, 43 percent said they think self-driving vehicles are unsafe, and 51 percent said they would not travel in one. To win over those who are skittish, advocates of the technology should proceed cautiously, Rajkumar says. “There has been a lot of, almost, hype about this technology,” he said. “Our Holy Grail is to build vehicles that drive themselves, but we also want them to be safe. We do not want a backlash in society that pushes this backwards by years, if not decades. We need to be grounded and realistic.”