I guess there's a mismatch in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be.
It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great.
I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc.
These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.
> in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be.
I don't understand at all what you mean by "should". The comment I was responding to said that [whatever this is] "wasn't a reality". This was a top-level comment to the announcement itself, not a response to a comment claiming "well, human-operated cars are officially over". Doing exactly what a current, human-operated car is an irrelevant, arbitrary point of comparison, introduced by the GP comment.
This makes exactly as much sense as saying that the first motor vehicles "weren't a reality" until, like a horse, you could take them on trails, jump over low obstacles, and live in the wilderness with them indefinitely.
That's what I'm pushing back against: it's classic ignorant Luddism to set imaginary bars for new technologies and then insist that the new tech isn't valuable at all on that basis. I know this is super-common, but it's an eternal pet peeve of mine, as I can't help but imagine how much better the world would be without people like this.
Many cars today have severely limited ability to drive on even rough roads (let alone off-road), that doesn't make them not "cars".
In general, I think the argument you are poorly phrasing the argument you are trying to make.
You seem to be trying to say that until self-driving technology can handle all use cases, you don't want to own a car without human driving controls.
I don't think such exclusively driverless cars will be marketed to consumers for a long time.
What we will see in the nearer is more standard consumer cars with varying ranges of level 4 self driving capabilities. These cars will match every one of your criteria.
What does whether or not a rural town can sustain a subway have to do with autonomous cars?
Roads currently exist that human beings can currently drive on. If you tell me you have a fully autonomous car, I would expect that to mean it can do everything a human can do on currently existing roads in all conditions that a human being can operate in. This seems entirely reasonable.
What does the behavior of current human-operated cars have to do with the value of domain-limited AVs?
Your comment was not "these are not 100% replacement for cars yet", which would obviously be uncontroversial. It was "these are not a reality yet". You've chosen an arbitrary bar for considering these "real", in exactly the same way that serving small rural communities is an arbitrary bar with which to dismiss the real value that subways create.
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