Technology

Tons of ways to structure that legally. Lobby for laws that protect makers of self driving cars, for one. Or have the occupants be ultimately responsible.

Road specs and markings will also need to evolve to support the technology. There will eventually be roads that are approved, and others that are not, and an evolution will have to occur where roads are brought up to spec so they can join the system. It sounds silly until you realize we’ve already done all this with the road markings and lighting and grading specs and lane width specs and signage standardization and and and and everything that goes into today’s roads. Right now all the focus is on making the cars adapt to a world not designed for them but in the long run it will be a convergence of cars and road systems that will happen.

I really feel as though the easiest way would be to rip the bandaid off and allow only robo cars.

But that comes with a slew of other issues such as peoples sovereignty.

It's also depressing, because all these organizations will spend all things money rather than just build the trains that would actually solve the transportation problems.

Just let 'em all go in a dead city, but give them features to use as facial expressions.

Elon Musk is rich enough to survive without a rent-free room in your head, dude

Driverless cars ultimately will have nothing to do with Elon Musk

The insurance companies will go for it if the data shows driverless cars cause fewer accidents and lower claims versus human drivers, but it seems like that data will be a long time coming because right now the court of public opinion goes nuts when a driverless car hits someone while ignoring all the times that a human does the same. It makes no sense, and I hope the insurance companies can make it make sense soon.

There's a high probability that if that taxi was a normal human driver they also would have hit and ran like the actual offending driver in the black sedan.

At least with the robotaxi they have dashcam footage of the assailant that ran.

Why haven’t they banned all cars

Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

You might think humans could at least think as long term as “it has to benefit my children in order for me to care” but the entire commercial world runs on “it has to make me as much money as possible within 3 months for me to care” and it’s just embarrassing.

To be fair, the incident they're referring to was from a driver hitting a pedestrian which then knocked them into the path of the Cruise vehicle. They actually do a pretty good job of not hitting things but every incident gets amplified greatly.

Until the vehicles can operate without hitting things at a better rate than human drivers they should never be allowed on public roads.

Humans are atrocious drivers, once that mark is reached it's a massive improvement with only upward trajectory from there

You just articulated the “100% or nothing” standard, which totally ignores how unsafe human drivers are. Let’s say humans score an 80% on safety today (after all hundreds of thousands are killed on the roads annually). You’re saying that a technology that’s only 92% safe should not be permitted. Nope. We need that last 8% to be there and we’ll withhold the 12% improvement from the public until it is - even though that has a cost of thousands of lives.

This is a way to get nowhere and kill as many people as possible.

Okay, I watched it.

Summary of video:

1. self driving cars are seen as a quick fix
2. we don’t have full self driving capabilities yet - Elon overstated his cars actual abilities
3. adding lanes has never fixed traffic - demand just fills the new capacity. Therefore self driving cars will make traffic worse.
4. cars are generally terrible and inefficient, hurray for trains
5. US cities were built for cars and not public transit: we should build denser cities instead of all this.

1 and 2 are beside the point and can be discarded.

3 is the core argument and is circular, essentially saying that anything that increases capacity will make traffic worse. If this seems fundamentally flawed, it’s because it is. It assumes infinite demand. You could easily apply this same logic to trains: add more frequent trains and riders will just flock to enjoy the new capacity until they are crowded again. The reality is that there is a right amount of capacity, and the question is what kinds of cars can best utilize the lane capacity we have.

4 and 5 are good points but mainly argue that we should not ONLY focus on self driving cars as a complete transportation panacea, which is true. But no one is doing that. Therefore this is a straw man argument.

The silent presumption of this entire video is that the sole, entire hope of self driving cars is to reduce urban traffic congestion. This is patently false. They also aim to improve on the abysmal safety record of human drivers, and improve fuel efficiency by taking people’s lead foot off the gas pedal, and finally to make access to a car more economical for those who don’t own one or can’t drive because of disability or age.

So basically, it’s what you’d expect from a YouTube video: some random guy leaning way too hard on a couple of limp arguments to make a sensational video that will get clicks because it has extreme claims in the title. Throw in some Elon hate and cherry picked videos of self-driving errors and the narrative is complete.

As long as they get a paycheck no outcome is an outcome.