People think the autonomous car is going to solve a lot of the current problems; Accidents, Parking, Congestion. It kind of makes me giggle a bit, as I ponder what may happen. That is, the conclusions drawn from "self-driving" vehicles are possibly way over cooked.
The certification process for these cars are going to be very, very expensive. Think about the software involved for the operation of aircraft and the review / testing process then apply it for the road. That is level of scrutiny that will be placed on "self-driving" vehicles.
Hacking, equipment failures, environmental surprises and more will be sure to keep a healthy portion of the public skeptical and possibly downright hostile to the idea for at least a decade, post certification, in my opinion. "Self-driving" will be contained and tightly regulated.
What people on the coasts forget about is, really, the rest of the country. The people that actually enjoy driving, where parking isn't a problem, and congestion takes place in the morning and after work, but only lasts about 5 minutes. Metro areas of > 2 million people don't have much problems with traffic in flyover country... at least not when compared to the coasts.
The counter arguments to the piece are plentiful for the foreseeable future.
Doesn't something like 80% of the US live in urban areas? And hasn't that number been continuously increasing for decades. People in the cities enjoy driving too, hell I love driving when their isn't any traffic. But I'd give it up in a heartbeat if it meant less needless traffic deaths and a far more streamlined lifestyle.
Technically speaking by US Census classifications but the definition of urban is very broad. You basically need a population of over 2500 to be in an urban cluster.
So where I live is "urban" and between myself and two neighbors, we're on about 70 acres of land.
Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want to drive their own car. Alphabet etc. will have a well-oiled team of lobbyists in every state and country to pass laws to make driving safer for everybody (i.e. more optimized for Waymo cars).
There will be a lot of people who join the NRA (National Retrovehicle Association), who'll make a stink about things. And they'll fight a rearguard action and probably win some guarantees in the more rural states. But where 90% of Americans live, the economics and legalities will work out to push everyone to self-driving cars.
And then economies of scale will be lost, and even in the remaining areas human car driving will become a luxury for people who own their own private roads.
People make this claim. Why would there be a premium over what is paid today? Maybe there's a big premium relative to much lower premiums associated with new types of vehicles although there will still be insurance needed. But that's relative to a future state, not relative to today.
That sounds like a bold claim. I mean, the current standard of technology works to quite a good extent already, performing many aspects of driving with considerably greater acumen than humans and being able to operate for extended periods without human intervention. It's also fairly well documented that the number of situations in which the software would have caused an accident without human intervention is above the average accident rate for human drivers, despite being tested in favourable conditions with sensibly conservative rules around humans intervening for a wide range of reasons before a critical situation can develop.
So it already works whilst being substantially less safe than the average human driver (without human intervention). They're working on the making-it-safer part, but given the number of edge cases they've got to deal with for Level 5 driving capability I'm not sure we should be so sure it'll surpass human driving abilities in all road conditions.
Working, for me, is when a typical consumer can buy it and use it day-to-day, on typical routes.
This is one of the most scariest points to me. Are any entities working on lobbying Congress about this? I've seen nothing on it, yet we already have a handful of these technologies on the road. One can retort with what offerings there are are "safer" than humans, but that's missing the point entirely.