In previews and official releases, we've been told that you can take carriages around. Also, a preview said that bandits were moving loot around on a carriage. My question is: does anyone know if we can control carriages ourselves? If not, I guess it can be modded in, but I have this vision of putting all my stuff on a carriage and moving from area from time to time.

I've wondered about these carriages too.

The way I see it, it would be really slow transport between cities. Or am I wrong?

It would be, but as a modder, I see a lot of possibilities for them when combined with a crafting system. Imagine portable crafting stations that are really heavy and you can set up temporary camps/abodes (think yurts) for a few weeks in game. If you have a carriage, you could move these really heavy things in bulk etc. You could set up a semipermanent house with all the crafting stuff loaded on your caravan, or you could mod it so that the carriage itself becomes a portable house like a gypsy caravan etc.

It has a lot of potential is what I'm thinking is all, so I'm curious.

I'm guessing it will sort of work like in red dead redemption with an option to skip to the destination. but from what I've read it can also be attacked by bandits and such
havent seen anything about wether or not we can control them though

I would be absolutely ecstatic if travelling in carriages would be like taxi's in GTA, where you can either watch the whole ride or just fast travel.

If not here is a really cool mod concept:

Drivable carriages.
NPC followers will grab a seat when you mount the carriage.
Take out one row of seats and replace with crafting equipment.
Put a chest in there for storage of loot so when you pull up to a cave to loot it, you can pack your chest with gear.
Put a bedroll in there too

Hell I'll have my own caravan of followers follow me in their carriages with merchants and stuff too

Honestly I don't see why we couldn't drive a carriage. The NPC's can do it and from what I've seen the ride is too long to be a scripted event, so they must have built interactive suspensions and wheels on the carriages. As long as they did, it should be easy to do something like this.

Has anybody heard whether or not they are destructible? I want to roll a flaming cart at a dragon and watch it explode MUHAHAHA.

Brilliant!

What I'm thinking is a model change so that you have something that is closed in the back with a persistent interior and an activator so that you can drive or go inside. The result would be a small house. As for cargo movement, a preview stated that bandits were moving loot on one, so I guess that you can do that already. Also, it is seen that the player at some point is on a cart that is driving, so I think it could be doable. The trick would be making it so that a horse could be attached to a cart.

The ultimate mod for carriages:
Wood chopping + iron smelting to make carriage wheels.
Wood to make carriage platform + leather for closed carriage or wood for open carriage
Horse domesticating etc to attach cart to horse

Boom, portable house crafted from nothing.

Just saw a video of a carriage on the youtubes. Looks like it's just a slightly fancier version of "fast travel" that you have to pay to use. The PC got in the carriage and the screen faded to black, then he appeared at his destination. No button prompt UI or anything saying "press (something) to skip to destination". Just another loading screen.

I'm curious why the devs even bothered adding this "feature"....

*disappointed*

You can't control them however you can sit in the carriage. If there's no option to take the trip normally I guess it could easily be fixed with a mod. The opening sequence starts with you on a carriage after all.

carriages are fast travel taxi between towns.

Hmm, well there goes my plan. I'm sure there'll be a mod to remedy this though, I think it'd be pretty cool to drive a carriage full of loot to a new home.