So is horse-riding, and some people still own personal horses. But most people don't, and those who do ride for fun, not for transportation. They take their car to go and ride their horse actually. Because horses are comparatively impractical.
When autonomous cars will be mainstream enough, there won't be any traffic jams in autonomous-only lanes (yes of course it will be a thing), contrary to those allowed to legacy cars. Also, fleet cars won't park, so the pressure to reclaim parking space in the cities will become enormous, and parking your personal car will become as hard as feeding your horses while shopping at Walmart. Human-driven cars will become as impractical compared to fleet cars as horses are compared to cars today.
> reporting of deaths
It's hard to predict which deaths remain newsworthy, and I don't feel like I can. However, I suspect that crashes between two autonomous cars will be very rare, compared to human driven vs. autonomous car crashes. And the primate-operated vehicle will be blamed, probably rightly. Musk considers he needs autonomous cars to be 10x safer than legacy ones, in order to overcome this effect, and expects to reach that level in a couple of years (he wrote that's when he'll remove the "beta" qualifier on his auto-pilot).
> when I drive in a snow storm.
Tesla's radars see perfectly well in the worse snowstorms, you don't. The car has reflexes orders of magnitude faster than yours, a direct connection to ABS sensors, etc. As of today, Tesla cars monitor their human drivers in every driving conditions, compares it to what the autopilot would have done, and whenever a discrepancy occurs, it sends a report over GSM to Tesla's engineering teams. That's how they improve their autopilot. As soon as you drive one you're teaching every car to drive better than you in pathological conditions :-)
So is horse-riding, and some people still own personal horses. But most people don't, and those who do ride for fun, not for transportation. They take their car to go and ride their horse actually. Because horses are comparatively impractical.
When autonomous cars will be mainstream enough, there won't be any traffic jams in autonomous-only lanes (yes of course it will be a thing), contrary to those allowed to legacy cars. Also, fleet cars won't park, so the pressure to reclaim parking space in the cities will become enormous, and parking your personal car will become as hard as feeding your horses while shopping at Walmart. Human-driven cars will become as impractical compared to fleet cars as horses are compared to cars today.
> reporting of deaths
It's hard to predict which deaths remain newsworthy, and I don't feel like I can. However, I suspect that crashes between two autonomous cars will be very rare, compared to human driven vs. autonomous car crashes. And the primate-operated vehicle will be blamed, probably rightly. Musk considers he needs autonomous cars to be 10x safer than legacy ones, in order to overcome this effect, and expects to reach that level in a couple of years (he wrote that's when he'll remove the "beta" qualifier on his auto-pilot).
> when I drive in a snow storm.
Tesla's radars see perfectly well in the worse snowstorms, you don't. The car has reflexes orders of magnitude faster than yours, a direct connection to ABS sensors, etc. As of today, Tesla cars monitor their human drivers in every driving conditions, compares it to what the autopilot would have done, and whenever a discrepancy occurs, it sends a report over GSM to Tesla's engineering teams. That's how they improve their autopilot. As soon as you drive one you're teaching every car to drive better than you in pathological conditions :-)