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Comment by burger_moon | Hacker News Reader

non-mobile link twitter.com/elonmusk/status/972233079342297088

and to comment on this, I wonder how long it will take before these pods will be completely vandalized. Regular buses with a driver who can boot off unruly people can't prevent the buses from getting trashed so an autonomous pod is going to face some real challenges in that regard. That being said, I'm glad they are prioritizing mass transit even if this is just a PR stunt or what have you.

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France already has multiple unmanned subway lines that manage to do okay. My bet is cameras and a non-trivial chance of vandals getting stopped at the next station would be sufficient protection against this.

Most airport inter-terminal transit systems I've seen are driverless. More relevantly, the Vancouver Skytrain is driverless (it's a proper city-scale system equivalent to other urban light rail). I haven't noticed a vandalization problem on any of them.

Generally, airports are out of the way from the usual populations that commit these crimes and don't see a lot of traffic from them.

Exactly. You generally don't have too many unsupervised youngsters bored with time to kill and bad ideas to pursue. The drinks there are adults with responsibilities who generally aren't looking to make trouble or get fired form their jobs for being delinquents.

I studied at a university which is connected with a driverless suspension railway [1].

Students aren't unsupervised youngsters with bad ideas as such but not far removed from the concept. The H-Bahn never really looked bad.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-Bahn

Different societies and cultures. Japan would also _not_ have this problem --while Brazil probably would.

Our society is new and in flux. It hasn't yet converged and congealed with a semi monolithic identity (even if from disparate parts). Who knows if it will ever happen. Maybe one day.

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