If a core goal is really to make thoroughfares safer and reduce traveler injuries/fatalities, we seem to be ignoring or discounting some pretty obvious options, like minimizing car traffic
This vision where we all get around in low-passenger-count autonomous robot cages on existing roadways is just one possible future but we seem to fixate on it. At the end of the day the car is a tool but we've allowed it to burrow into the collective psyche
What about making cities walkable, bikeable, segway-able, wheelchair-able, scooter-able, whatever, with proven public transportation options like trains or buses running fixed routes for longer commutes? Much more energy efficient, way easier than autonomous cars, and conducive to much more livable urban areas imo
It will take some effort to change habits and expectations and revamp infrastructure but surely that's as worthwhile as all the time and money going into FSD?
In parts of the city I live in it has become very uncomfortable to drive a car, there are just too many pedestrians and bikers, and this has encouraged be to bike even more. For distances of less than 6km there is no time advantage when using a car. And in the highway I just use normal driver assist functions like lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, and it's enough.
I will go even further and say that reducing injuries and fatalities is just an excuse for FSD development, so the public thinks it's a good idea to go with it. The real reason is that a fleet of autonomous taxis can be very profitable.
There is really no evidence that FSD fleets will reduce car usage or fatalities, so really it could be the wrong solution for the wrong problem.
Electric rideables are the future, and if we could give them storage on public transport and a lane of road, they would go a long way.
This is part of the problem imo
Remote employee "drivers" take over when a car signals that it doesn't know what to do
Because it has lost connectivity due to a technical glitch, an outage in the cell network, lack of coverage (tunnel, …)
I'm extremely confident that self-driving cars will never make a significant improvement on car safety.
I'm also confident that it will never be applicable to anything but highway driving in good weather conditions - we will never see a Level 5 car, those designations have about as much practical relevance to us as the Kardashev scale.
First of all, the safety statistics that we have with modern cars today is such that you need to run 10 million cars for several years before you have gathered enough statistics to say whether a new development has actually improved the situation. For instance if you take the Volvo XC90, there has not been a single fatal accident in the US or UK since the model was launched in 2002, with over 1 million such cars sold in those markets combined. That kind of lag in your dev cycle means it's extremely hard to do any sort of meaningful development of a machine learning system in a way that demonstrably improves safety.
Second of all, human factors such as being distracted by a cell phone or being intoxicated, plus not wearing a seat belt, accounts for the overwhelming majority of fatal accidents. It is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, much easier to build a system that detects such conditions and then deliberately slows down or stops the car. It's already being deployed today and will only increase in the future, so most of the potential safety improvement from self-driving will be eaten up by other tech.