I want to be done with car shaped cars... I want a self driving room to show up...I want to say "send me a living room/bedroom/office/whatever," and have a room shaped vehicle show up to get me. I want that vehicle to drive me to the nearest train tracks and hop on the tracks itself and then zoom me to the nearest hyper loop and jump itself on that to zip me across the country in an hour... Join up with other "rooms" as you go to create a typical looking train
I think what they want is trains with individual private cars that can automatically choose the tracks you want by selecting a destination. Which would be fucking awesome it's how I thought cars worked when I was 4, I swear all the steering wheel did was change lanes (my folks were good drivers I guess).
Didn't Elmo muskrats tunnel end up causing more traffic?
I know it's just a meme but they both solve different enough problems. A self-driving car can easily turn back into a non-self driving car, meaning you can self drive for long transit and switch to a normal one in the city or hectic areas. This basically solves the issue of self drive tech not being smart/reliable enough. Which, as you probably also agree, is still quite far from perfect.
If tomorrow we banned non-self-driving (NSD) cars, sure. But in most countries, grandfathering in old cars is going to happen for a while. Which means that self-driving and non-self-driving cars will have to share the road.
I could see some transitions possibly. For example, on a 4-lane highway: "In 2027, lane 1 will be separated by a barrier and only allow SD cars. Lanes 2-4 will be for NSD cars only. In 2029, lanes 1-2 for SD. By 2033, NSD cars will be banned on this highway."
I just keep thinking about the automated robots that have existed since I was a child that just followed a painted line on the ground. Those operate around people, other robots and vehicles in ways similar to traffic on a public road, and yet they have none of the issues autonomous cars have. They're far, far more simple.
It's not a hard problem to solve. It's not hard to see the reasoning behind a desire for self driving cars. Anyone who lives outside of a big city in the US knows this.
Roads are already present. Traffic control is already present.
Tie the goddamn roads to the goddamn traffic control and have it coordinate the cars. The cars input their destination, and have radar to stop the car to prevent accidental collision.
The problem is people don't like that they can't get to their destination faster, they don't have the freedom of choosing their exact route, and they can't just rev their engine whenever they want.
It's not mass transit, but it solves the final distance problem.
Building railway tracks to achieve universal coverage for the entire US without be a massive undertaking that would require a huge effort over multiple decades. Compared to that, building self driving cars is downright trivial. Let's not forget that they exist already, albeit in limited areas. People should not let their (justified) anger at Musk blind them to reality.
So bike lanes but for cars. What could go wrong.
