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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

What everyone seems to be ignoring when it comes to autonomous cars is that the last 1% or 0.1% or whatever remains unsolvable for "AI" might not really matter.

We can change roads, ffs! At the bare minimum, we could fence off difficult areas and force manual driving. Once many people own an autonomous car, there will be pressure to make roads safe and convenient for them.

Phantom braking for instance, is only a safety issue when the following car gets too close. Lanes can be annotated, etc.

The "AI" part is just marketing to get these cars on the road and set the customer's expectations. Once that is done, the hard parts will just be moved from the car manufacturer to the road builders.

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Road infrastructure is crazy expensive and even if you are willing to rebuild it for the autonomous cars instead of building a mass transit, you will have either segregated roads for autonomous cars(which is essentially individualistic mass transit) or you will have mixed car infrastructure.

The US has a road network of 7 million km and apparently it costs about 1 million to 45 million[0] to build 1 km of road, depending on the nature of the infrastructure. Obviously the higher end is for large roads built in city centres but even at the lower end of the cost spectrum its crazy expensive.

IMHO doesn't make sense to rebuild the infrastructure for autonomous cars. If you re going to rebuild the infrastructure you can be better of to built continent wide mass transit. At least you won't need parking lots.

[0] https://compassinternational.net/order-magnitude-road-highwa...

Half of the city infrastructure is dedicated to supporting 3000-5000 pounds of highly manufactured metal to move a single 100-200 pound passenger going the same direction as everyone else.

And we want to spends billions on autonomous driving so we can continue being locked in the absolute least efficient solution so we can require manufacturing another $10k or so of equipment on hundreds of millions of cars to enable FSD?

This is a sham sold for the money.

Every time I see someone start a new planned community I am wondering why they haven't designed it with autonomous vehicles in mind. You could get away with much simpler systems.

I would think the opposite... If I planned a community I would take 0 thoughts into self driving cars. I'd focus on making sure every single area can be reached via a walking/bike path.

Self driving will figure it out anyway (given enough time).

You are severely underestimating how much of regular traffic problems are unsolved and far from being solvable with current tech. It's not 1% or 0.1%, it's probably closer to 5% or more if you include all year round conditions and countries with less car-friendly roads than the USA.

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