“This was not reckless driving. This was murder,” the judge said before she read out Mackenzie Shirilla’s verdict Monday afternoon.
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.
Because self driving cars would allow people who otherwise couldn’t drive for themselves to own yet another car on the road. Teenagers, elderly, people with chronic alcohol addiction, you get the idea.
I don’t fully buy the “no traffic jams or accidents” thing either. There is definitely the potential for there to be less, but what you are talking about is something that isn’t going to happen for ateast another decade. Surely you remember the Tesla crisis from the last year?
I can see ride sharing becoming a thing for the people under the poverty line, but realistically speaking, everyone is going to buy a car. There is no incentive for a billions of dollars company to put less cars on the road using ride sharing, some of them already sell you heated seats in the form of a monthly subscription.
You’re making the mistake of applying the behavior of people today with the behavior of people over a decade from now.
Truly autonomous vehicles would fundamentally change the way the world views transportation, it will just take a while to get to that point.
By the time we get to a critical mass of self driving cars, it’s very likely that owning cars won’t be a thing outside of the wealthy.
The organizations that will be running the transportation services will have a vested interest in keeping as few vehicles in a fleet as possible, thus removing vehicles from the road (if we haven’t reached that point by the time self driving cars are a real thing)
Also the idea that the people who couldn’t otherwise own a car would suddenly have $50k+ to go out and buy an autonomous vehicle is silly.
