The “EV” part seems to be carrying the weight there, not the self-driving. Self-driving might even make those problems worse by decreasing the cost of driving.
It’s like saying “self-driving cars and solving the nitrogen fixation problem would be a big win for preventing famine.”
It just seems like this whole endeavor is solving the wrong problem. Building a self driving car is like making a faster horse. Individual cars on roads is incredibly inefficient and even EVs have a huge negative impact on health and air quality from tire and brake dust.
Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate
and the air quality.
Counterpoint: no, they wouldn't. Moving towards self-driving automobiles merely props up an inefficient mode of transportation. Imagine sinking all that money that's being blown on self-driving cars into pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. The problem with cars is cars, not drivers.
AFAIK most of the cynicism around self driving cars is not that it is not possible, but rather that it doesn’t solve the problems they claim to be solving. E.g. self driving cars won’t solve traffic (busses do), they won’t be safer (trains are), they won’t be convenient (unless you are rich enough to afford one), and at the end of the day, they are still massive things that takes tonnes of space and infrastructure and pollute a bunch. Just like human driven cars.
Yeah, but the future of self-driving cars seems brighter than the one of self-driving tractors (on pre-computed routes): you can solve a massive urban problem VS help some rich farmers to save some time
I don't want to be a party pooper but I am kinda worried that self-driving cars are an ecological disaster in the making. We already need to limit GHG emissions, and switching to public transport is a good way to do it. However, with self-driving cars, one of the main incentives for public transport (you don't have to drive) is gone.
Yeah, here's my solution to the myriad problems with this idea: self-driving electric cars as delivery vehicles. It's far more realistic and practical in every conceivable way.
The problem with self-driving cars is you can get most of the way to a working solution but that’s not good enough.
If the solution is flawed even a little bit, people will die. That will give self-driving cars a bad reputation and people will be unwilling to ride in them.
If you are going to geofence self-driving cars it is questionable whether they are better than trains and buses.
I think the best we can hope for in the next 10 years is better driver assistance systems, like GM Super Cruise or Tesla’s Autopilot (if they can make it stop crashing into things).
P.S. Forgot to mention that cities full of cars are unpleasant to see and hear, and to navigate for pedestrians. Replacing human-driven cars with self-driving cars does nothing for this, just like it doesn't address the emissions problem. Self-driving cars are worse even than taxis in a number of ways.
It's the non-existence of affordable electric self-driving cars that's the problem. Not everyone can indulge in this type of irreality. Some people live in the suburbs and have to get to work tomorrow with cars that exist rather than cars that are "nearly" here, or "just around the corner", or "inevitable" or whatnot.
To misquote a famous Rabbi, if you have a sapling in your hand and someone rushes to tell you that the inexpensive fully self-driving electric car has arrived, first plant the sapling and then go and see about the car.
What does self-driving have to do with any of the other things though? Whether there's a human behind the wheel of an EV or an algorithm doesn't make any difference for climate change. If anything, the money wasted on self-driving could have gone into more pragmatic goals.
It’s like saying “self-driving cars and solving the nitrogen fixation problem would be a big win for preventing famine.”
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