What's the risk profile of an empty autonomous car driving 20 mph on local roads to my doorstep, vs a fully autonomous vehicle?
In cities where taxis are more ubiquitous, why isn’t level 5 simply replaces the taxi drivers with computers no? Then it’s not really a new paradigm, just that (a) traffic might flow better and (b) places where taxis aren’t cheap and plentiful (most of the USA, much of Western Europe) get to have an experience similar to a middle class lifestyle in a developing country.
Allowing high speed cars anywhere (even on the twisty "empty" roads) is the main reason the public realm is now objectively dangerous.
Driving should have been integrated in the culture as a solemn activity, only reserved to those with impeccable integrity and high moral standing, a true privilege in which the driver assumes responsibility for the lives of others, and accepts accountability commensurate with this duty.
Ending somebodies life, injuring others, causing damage, those are the inevitable by-products of careless driving, of driving for sport.
I'm exaggerating for emphasis. But driving as a hobby should be reserved to the racetrack. Just like shooting guns as a hobby is reserved to the gun range.
This obviously doesn't quite translate, but the amount of damage you can do with a car is massive, even at that speed. Also consider the weight, eg when rolling over a pedestrian.
I don't think you can set something loose in traffic that relies on everyone else correcting for its mistakes.
My point is, if I see a car coming, I'm not going to cross the street and let it hit me. That's the reason parents teach their kids to look both ways before crossing the street. Some idiot driver, human or otherwise, may not be controlling their vehicle in a predictable manner. At 20mph, as a pedestrian I can make a good decision about crossing the street.
I feel much safer about an empty driverless car at 20mph on local roads than one full of passengers at highway speeds.
(20 mph is entirely made up, it could be higher or lower in relationship to actual human reaction times)
Or, would you be willing to pay higher premiums or even extra tolls and taxes in order to drive yourself?
I think this will eventually be a question that fails over into economics while people are arguing about it. Insurers will be in a good place to influence the future of automated driving.
Humans as a group can't even not drive drunk, still. Individuals are not predictable either. Our taste for control will have to be worked around. (Hopefully in ways that allow us more time to...for example drive in VR, on a better course, with an even more stimulating feeling of presence, while we are driven around...)
Most people are willing to pay for things they enjoy.
It's also possible that a human driven car could use its autonomous driving system as a safety system to intervene if it anticipates a crash.
DUI test else engine does not start.
Speed limit as per road and weather conditions no car needs to do 70mph in the city or 150 mph anywhere.
Alertness check and monitoring , if not alert, car stops and that's it.
Cars sit idle 80-90% of their useful life. As an auto manufacturer I don't need to achieve L{n} autonomous to make money, I just need wheels moving not parked.
Wheels moving at 20mph on local roads, in-between paid trips with human drivers, is a huge market and with a lower risk profile than L4 or L5 autonomous. The fat margins here are in making idle capital more productive.
In my understanding, cars that drive more break faster, mileage being the dominant factor, not age.
So whether you have 10 cars serving 10 people, breaking after 30 years, or one car serving 10 people where you have to buy a new one every 3 years - seems about the same.
In the former model, car makers even have the opportunity to get people to buy new cars before they'd technically have to, which sounds like more money to me.
For society at large, the latter model seems better.
The biggest problem with most self-driving cars is that they are easily fooled by various images, since they have extremely simplistic image classifiers to work with, rather than hugely specialized mamallian visual cortexes. Speed of processing is one aspect, but not nearly the only one. The Tesla that ran over that cyclist crossing that street at night wasn't missing reaction time, it simply didn't recognize the cyclist as an obstacle for whatever reason.
Now as far as I understand, lidar mostly fixes these false negatives (in good weather conditions), but at the cost of more false positives - and here speed could be a bigger help.
Even so, L4 and L5 would require planning skills and understanding of other traffic participants and road conditions that are still beyond us, at any speed. Note that the CEO of Waymo has plainly stated that L5 is not achievable with current sensor technologies.
Perhaps at some extreme low speeds (probably closer to human walking speed than 20mph) L2 could work as L3, but I think that's about it.