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Comment by throwaway123989 | Hacker News Reader

> I remain convinced that "real" self driving (as in: go ahead and sleep in the backseat) will never happen without changes to road infrastructure and possibly some sort of segregation between robot-driven cars and people-driven cars.

Yep, I talk to people working in traffic engineering, and their mindset is always building new road tech and road-side and cloud infra to support autonomous driving. They have no expectation of fully autonomous vehicle without road and infrastructure assistance.

And from historical perspective, the coming of automotive and the replacement of horse and other animal carts, are exactly facilitated by the road transformation; which has been the single largest scale infrastructure in human history.

It makes no sense that an even bigger transformation of the vehicle would require less drastic road transformation.

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Which is funny because everything sort of comes back to trains.

The very marginal benefits of laying road vs track more or less disappear when automation in play.

Is is really worth maintaining the ability to go off road/track when you’re not even driving anymore?

Exactly. All edge cases disappear when you lay tracks on the road.

Yes. You bring up a great point: With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway and organize into closely-spaced convoys. Only the lead vehicle would need an active human driver; the rest could follow at extremely close distances--drafting off each other--and would not need a human driver (or their human drivers could go off-duty). The point of using asphalt rather than rails is that it makes it easy to switch between individual car mode and automated virtual train mode.

This idea is not new and it mostly applies to freight convoys but I think it also has merit for ad hoc passenger car convoys on long highway trips.

> With some infrastructure improvements we could have "virtual" trains. Vehicles would talk to each other on the highway

I think the idea is to get rid of the roads and have the robo vehicles travel instead on tracks. That increases fuel efficiency and bypasses a lot of AI challenges.

Not only that. Overhead electrical solves a lot of the mining/environmental impact of batteries.

It’s the low-key case that Elon will be remembered poorly (like Robert Moses’ rapidly degrading legacy) for

1) Having the wrong vision for EVs (but successfully executing non it anyway)

2) Making space travel cheap (thereby increasing the amount of carbon energy dedicated to it) without really improving an average human’s quality of life

Plus messing up astronomy and maybe helping bring about Kessler syndrome. Good point about overhead electrical.

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