“This was not reckless driving. This was murder,” the judge said before she read out Mackenzie Shirilla’s verdict Monday afternoon.
Right? I honestly can’t wait until self driving cars take up enough of the market share that manual driving cars will be outlawed (or at least getting insurance on them will be astronomically expensive)
What dumb is that we can improve public transit today. Unlike self driving cars, there is no technological barrier. The only thing stopping us from improving public transit is that fact that humans (especially in North America) are selfish, greedy, easily manipulated, and apathetic.
Public transit doesn’t improve because not enough people don’t want to use public transit and not enough people want to use public transit because it doesn’t improve.
Not the cars themselves but I think it’ll happen like this: self driving cars will eventually get good enough that they will have a lower accident rate in certain conditions, like highways. Insurance companies will push for self-driving-only lanes on the highway, while not lowering your rates but charging you extra for manual driving. Then it will be segments of highways, then certain surface streets, etc. Eventually you’ll only be driving the “last mile” if it’s a personal car or relying on a service that sends self-driving cars and drops you off on the corner. Manual driving on public streets will mostly disappear.
Not to mention that self driving cars will be the destruction of the environment.
If you don’t want to drive, try to use public transportation or possibly human powered vehicles such as bicycles. Cars are bad enough as is. The only reason I even drive is to go to work and the grocery store in my town with basically no public transportation other than taxis.
I have no clue how you came to the conclusion that self driving cars would be more harmful to the environment than human driven ones, but even if the number of cars on the road remained the sane (it would actually drastically decrease), and even if all self driving cars were ICEs, vehicle emissions would still drastically stop.
If every car was self driving, then every car would know the position of every other car around it and be able to communicate to every other car. Traffic jams would cease to exist, and potentially even stopping at intersections would go away too.
But, the reality is that once self driving cars reach that critical mass, owning a car won’t be a thing anymore. You’ll pay a service to shuttle you around. Hell, if the service was a public utility then it would be trivial to set up ride sharing for a reduced rate. That would be what drastically decreases the amount of cars on the road.
