Ironic how by 'saving money' without the human driving the car, they end up probably spending a mountain more on engineers debugging this software constantly along with cleaning staff and maintenance for the entire fleet, legal staff for regulatory issues, and no doubt a huge insurance bill to pay. Sunk cost is a strong fallacy to see past I guess.
I don’t think you grasp the scale of this change. You think that this “mountain of engineers“ will equal to the (eventual) number of taxi drivers displaced? WORLDWIDE?
Also, you think those engineers, capable of creating an autonomous car, somehow will find it too difficult to install liquid detectors all over the car and combine them with cameras inside to would allow for instantaneous, remote inspection of the car and imposing the penalties/taking the car offline – all of which are possible with existing technology?
All I'm saying is that when you look at other sectors with low cost labor, smart money like mcdonalds had the tech stack to replace their burger flippers with robots just like the auto industry in the 1970s, so there's probably a good reason why they still have human burger flippers today.
Robots that can flip burgers are expensive. Robots that can drive us around already exists and so affordable that we see billions of them on the roads, they are called cars. All the road robots need is a better steering system, we don't need to invent tricky machinery. The burger flipping robots however would need tons of different new movable parts to be invented, mass produced and shipped all over etc. That would be expensive.
