The reason our self-driving utopia hasn’t arrived, it argues, is because it was never really supposed to. Instead, the promise of self-driving cars were just a lure to keep cities from building public transit, something America’s scions have been at since the mass production car first spawn an entire new galaxy of industries.
I always assumed it was a bubbly phase that occurred because US demographics, where a bunch of investors were eager to capture the relative wealth concentration of a baby-boomers who would soon become unable to drive themselves.