>>1813869I could never take this self driving car bullshit seriously for that and other reasons.
Like, one of the major selling points of cars is that they're not fully autonomous. That you can drive them yourself, anywhere you want, at any point in time, even to places where there is no proper infrastructure, where roads don't have proper lane markings, etc.
That's the real value a car gives me. Why would they waste millions of dollars on a technology that is such a small improvement and adds so little to the overall value of the product in comparison to just that mere fact? Most auto makers seem hellbend on removing the steering wheel once level 5 becomes feasible. They're wasting millions of dollars, gazillion of man hours on creating a technology, that has no point. Makes you wonder: Is a car without a steering wheel even a car in the literal sense anymore?
Wait, let's ask ourselves another thing: Where would a fully autonomous vehicle be most useful? On the highway or in the city? In the city, right? Wait... personal transport vehicles that move autonomous through our cities... Oh wait, we already have those, it is called PRT and as it turns out, they're much cheaper to build, run and maintain because as it turns out, instead of creating a digital super intelligence and collecting millions of hours of training data for said digital super intelligence, (or alternatively: mapping every single public road in the US down to fractions of an inch and feeding that into an algorithm, in a car that has been equipped with LidAR, Radar and a fucking NASA computer) WE CAN JUST PUT A FUCKING RAIL SOMEWHERE AND CALL IT A DAY.
What people need to understand: cars already drive on infrastructure purpose build for that exact class of vehicle. If we want the car to navigate that infrastructure autonomously but it just can't do it: maybe just standardize the infrastructure? And again you realize why rails exist.
