It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. I've work…
There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will a…
And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives, we’d implement these measures today rather than banking on a long term tech solution.
I believe that self driving is about a fantasy world in which we can ignore all the negative consequences of a low density, car centric world. Pedestrian deaths? AI magic will solve it. Long commutes? Just eat breakfast in your car! Emissions? Why well just switch over to EVs! Never mind that half of this tech is either not real, or orders of magnitude less efficient than the transit that Europe has used for almost half a century!
The truth is we can fix all of these things right now, but it would involve sacrifices for those whom the system is already benefitting. So instead we’ve made up a fantasy world where we can have our cake and eat it too.