Let's make the roads out of rubber and the wheels out of pavement. I feel like this is the backwards mentality with autonomous vehicles. I wrote a while ago about how they simply cannot solve the transportation problem, at least not in a way that's cheaper than just building mass transit:
I realize this particular case is different with us talking about assistance/safety features, but I still feel we're going the wrong direction here. These features reduce your awareness. They're like a teenage driver you constantly have to monitor, but worse.
They teach people to be comfortable and less alert with systems that have potentially fatal bugs that we can't yet identify.
We can build mass transit now, at a fraction of the cost of developing the tech for automated vehicles. There are so many corner cases, with highways, city driving conditions that simply cannot pan out for autonomous vehicles without a lot of testing; and a lot of people getting injured and dying.
I wish people would shelve this pipe dream for now. Maybe once we have really solid rail transport again in the US, like we use to decades ago, and rich and poor people can have a means to work even in smaller cities; then we can work on frivolous junk that will benefit the few that can afford it. Right now we just run the risk of killing more people who can't.
But we haven't, not in America. Sure the rest of the world does, but we've lost most of our mass transit over the past century.
Knowing you can get on a train at 2am and make it home does play a significant role in reducing drunk driving, and can benefit people of all income levels.
https://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-so...
I realize this particular case is different with us talking about assistance/safety features, but I still feel we're going the wrong direction here. These features reduce your awareness. They're like a teenage driver you constantly have to monitor, but worse.
They teach people to be comfortable and less alert with systems that have potentially fatal bugs that we can't yet identify.
We can build mass transit now, at a fraction of the cost of developing the tech for automated vehicles. There are so many corner cases, with highways, city driving conditions that simply cannot pan out for autonomous vehicles without a lot of testing; and a lot of people getting injured and dying.
I wish people would shelve this pipe dream for now. Maybe once we have really solid rail transport again in the US, like we use to decades ago, and rich and poor people can have a means to work even in smaller cities; then we can work on frivolous junk that will benefit the few that can afford it. Right now we just run the risk of killing more people who can't.