I disagree about being no negatives. Cars with or without drivers are ruining both our cities and our planet and San Francisco already has multiple excellent public transportation options. All driverless cars do is discourage people from taking public transit.
I see them as a stepping stone towards a mostly carless society personally.
I also think anyone being discouraged from taking public transit would likewise buy a car before taking public transit. I can even see the opposite, where it lets people who still need a car 5% of the time sell their ride in exchange for mostly public transit and a bit of taxi.
Individually owned cars are the devil and true public transport is definitely king, but I think driverless taxi services can serve an important niche.
I think you’re missing the end goal here, which is having everyone in a driverless car. The taxis are a first step in that direction. It will by no means stop there.
There was a reason why GM was investing so heavily in Cruise (until a woman got dragged under a Cruise car in SF during a crash). They weren’t doing it in the hopes people would transition to public transit.
I’m not missing the end goal, I just don’t think GM will pull back if we decide to ban driverless cars or boycott them.
We both want 100% public transport but that’s beside the point, the event happened because the car was driverless, not because it wasn’t a bus.
If someone was proposing to ban all cars in San Francisco, I’m all for it but that isn’t really what’s happening. But for now, I’ll take driverless cars even if it only gets rid of a couple privately owned ones.
The obvious intent is that driverless cars would be a new model of ownership. Where you buy the car, then pay a yearly flat subscription to use driverless features.
Step 2 would be an insurance reduction for removing manual driving, then they could start per-mile system like ISP and cell phone providers do per gigabyte of data used.
It’s going to weird when people are choosing a vehicle based on whether it will decide to drive you off the cliff, or just plow through the pedestrian. There will be a Jerryrigeverything who buys cars to test their self driving to destruction.
Given how little liability auto manufactures have due to the responsibility put on the driver, I don’t see why they would be pushing for self driving. Unless there’s a single unified AI that makes the same driving decisions for every car, which I don’t think is a good thing, the manufactures will then take the responsibility for accidents involving their proprietary driving software.
