It’ll enable people who cannot drive, such as children and the elderly, to drive.

Accordingly this is going to significantly increase the amount of cars on the road which will make traffic miserable.

We should make cars with extra seats that follow common routes. We could even give them their own lanes and infrastructure.

We could make them extra long, and add hyper efficient metal wheels on metal roadways.

The average American spends about an hour a day driving. You are awake for about 16 hours a day. So truly self-driving cars, where you can fall asleep or pull out your laptop and work on something else, give you 1/16th of your life back. If you live to the age of 80, it's like an extra five years.

That's worth a lot. Some kind of hybrid state where you need to always have your eyes on the road but maybe can take your hands off the wheel? Yeah I agree, I don't really see the point in that case. Or at least it's not something I get excited over.

To be fair, what will happen is more likely to be 5 extra years on Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

Why would fewer deaths be impossible to quantify? Insurers already lower your premiums if your car has modern safety features, like automatic emergency braking. I'd posit that if we replaced human drivers with Tesla's FSD (never mind Waymo tech) today, we'd save lives on the net. We just accept that getting T-boned by a texting driver is "an accident" and those "just happen", whereas getting hit by a self-driving car is "omgwtfbbq those self-driving cars can't be trusted", so standards for self driving cars are unnecessarily higher. (Just imagine the median driver; by definition 50% of drivers are worse.)

How is that possible if FSD has so many safety controls? Are their controls so easily bypassed that they're effectively non-existent?

There’s a large portion of the population in the US, mostly lower income, that commutes two hours a day. Solving self driving means giving those people that time back. That’s time that can be used to relax, take a nap, communicate with friends, etc. Self driving will be a boon for mental health.

alternatively, we can reshape cities with better public transit, liveable walkable areas, and allow people to not need a car. europe and asia look at america and shake their heads. which is money more well spent?

Sure, with 80 years and a trillion dollars that could work. Why bother working on self driving software when you can restructure all of society.

Considering how modern, US society was built for cars perhaps it's only fair we dial that back a bit. The end result is likely to be more humane and ecologically sustainable.

Absolutely, we should be building public transportation for the next generation. But pretending that it’s a solution for people today and using it as an excuse not to build self driving cars is short sighted and stupid.

Ok then do it. I don't think you can. People are too into cars here. It's fun to dream about the perfect city layout but we need realistic ideas.

Road deaths are the biggest killer of people aged 9 to 29, taking about 1.35M lives annually. That's roughly on par with USA Coronavirus deaths for the entire pandemic.

If autonomous driving can considerably reduce that road death number, I'd say it's a worthwhile endeavour.

Where are you getting that death number? I'm seeing numbers around 43k, 30 times lower. Is your figure including health damage from air pollution or something? Or is it an aggregate over many years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Dude it’s obviously the global number.

I think you're right, though I don't think it's so obvious when it's being specifically compared with US COVID deaths.

Going to work in a driverless taxi, being able to work while driving. I could do that now with a regular taxi, but the driver sitting in front is a bit expensive. Only needing the car should make it a lot more affordable.

The bus is only $3. Plus it takes longer so you get more work time!

I can't really work properly while standing at the busstop waiting for the bus, or when I get on and the seating is too cramped for a 14" laptop.

I imagine a world in which I can take a road trip while asleep in my car (or reading or working). That would be pretty wonderful.

You mean like a train?

A majority of the use cases for self-driving cars are either solvable, or already solved, by some combination of better urban planning (i.e. zoning and probably large-scale regulatory reform), public transit (specifically useful public transit), and public investment. Unfortunately, in the United States, we are unable to do even one of these things sufficiently well, hence the need for self-driving cars (or, in some cases, some other technological solution; e.g. hyperloop).

I don’t know, can a train take you from any arbitrary point to any other arbitrary point?

Can a car?

Why do people always seem to forget that cars also requires huge infrastructure changes, even more so than some other options.

Yes, from the train station inside my garage to the train station inside the hotel. /s

No it's not like that at all. It leaves whenever you want.

Less deaths. This is a huge win.

More phone time

The irony being I get nauseus if look at my phone in a moving car.

In a potential future with self driving cars i do see massive benefits for women wanting safe rides home. Many still have hard time with being creeped out by drivers often enough.

Look out your window and imagine what we could do with all the street space that's dedicated to parking.

Biggest benefit is that most people will stop owning cars.

Traffic is going to be the same or higher. Instead of parking the car nearby you, the car has to travel to/from a parking hub.

I really dislike cars, I know there are sometimes necessary, I hate car parking spots, but this "hey we can safe parking spots" argument doesn't really work imo.

Only if they aren’t taxis. Then it’s just a matter of moving onto the next fair. Course, using a taxi or Uber to avoid parking fees is already a well understood thing.

Yeah this is it. And we get to reuse the existing roads hopefully without having to build more. We can make better use of suburban sprawl.

You are free to chase whatever you want. Same goes for those who have chosen FSD.

Self-driving cars, particularly if they communicate, can safely keep shorter following distances. All-else-equal, this means that many more cars can drive on the same amount of road.