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Comment by haxel | Hacker News Reader

What about variably-autonomous cars? Take a car with self-driving capability and then have it be manually operated while solitary but increasingly self-driving as the group of similarly automated cars it belongs to grows. There's a lot of benefits to group awareness: share sensors, coordinate behavior for efficiency, instant communication, and so on.

This gives us the best of both worlds: safety in numbers, safety in automation and sensors, and it retains the personal autonomy we're used to. All while not requiring 100% perfect autonomous capability.

If the cars were small and cheap enough, they could be made available via subscription (much like a lease) and treated like a municipal transportation network that's superior to light rail and bus networks.

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This is definitely along the lines of what transportation tech has done to date. Instead of new replacing old altogether, the options just get more flexible over time, easier to "packet switch". You don't take just the bike or the bus, you take the bike to the bus and open up a set of possibilities different from the two alone.

Likewise with the new generation of small EVs, visual processing, and networking, you can scale the infrastructure for everything more exactly, with a variety of vehicles of different sizes and carefully synchronized transfers, instead of forcing car traffic into primacy.

From that perspective it's easy to see why PRT was a hard sell - it's less flexible than a car and it doesn't have the capacities of light rail. The automation part has stuck, though.

Just as a reminder, ”instant“ communication is not really instant. There is latency, it increases with the number of cars involved and it’s not negligible for safety purposes (e.g. emergency braking).

That's sort of what Google is doing with their little fully-autonomous 25MPH car. Senior communities will be full of those things in a few years.

Would special roads or guideways for those help? Possibly. Parking garages dedicated to those things are likely. They can be parked several deep because the blocking cars can be asked to move.

The future of self-driving cars has more to do with where they go when not in use than what they do while carrying passengers.

A herd of sufficiently smart enough self-driving cars should be able to use their network of sensors to allow "manual" drivers to move freely through, should it not?

I would think that one should be able to drive even more freely; as the reaction time of the herd, and the individual cars, could accommodate situations that even highly trained human drivers would fail at.

Yeah, I would think that such a herd or swarm would be fully backward and forward compatible. Traditional cars could keep doing what they do - swarms would react intelligently to them as swarms tend to do - and there wouldn't be any need for specialized infrastructure to support pure automation.

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