[central_va]

I am against driver less cars because the idea of personal transportation is supposed to cheap and available to the masses. We keep loading cars down with technology and EPA required equipment and pretty soon only the rich can afford to buy and keep them up. Even used the cars will be prohibitively expensive.

We don't even have driver less trains and they run on rails for heavens sake.

[Gunslingr3]

We don't even have driver less trains and they run on rails for heavens sake.

That has more to do with unions than technology.

The problem with the author's premise is that he holds "fail proof" and "flawless" as some kind of standard. Fact is people are not fail proof and flawless drivers. The automation need only exceed fallible humans, not meet some perfection standard. 10s of thousands of needless deaths can be avoided annually, nevermind hundreds of thousands of injuries.

There will still be accidents, just fewer of them due to careless people.

[Gunslingr3]

I am against driver less cars because the idea of personal transportation is supposed to cheap and available to the masses.

Automated vehicles could actually facilitate sharing services. Imagine living in a city and subscribing to BMW's car service. You hit a button on your phone and summon a car within minutes. The manufacturers are already looking into models like this.

Don't think of vehicle automation as a one size fits all solution. It is going to allow for even more niches.

[discostu]

We lack driverless trains because unions won’t allow it. They easily could be automated with the exact same technology running automated mine operations now, but somebody needs to protect the jobs. And driverless cars will START as prohibitively expensive, but as the technology gets mass produced it will become cheaper and move from luxury vehicles to midrange, to economy. Just like automatic transmissions, power windows, AC, GPS, anti-lock brakes... That’s the normal cycle of the market, new fangled tech starts expensive, gets adopted, gets commoditized, becomes cheaper, winds up everywhere.

[fella]

"We keep loading cars down with technology and EPA required equipment and pretty soon only the rich can afford to buy and keep them up."

The manufacturers have already done this with full sized pickups without the EPA. Pickups used to be reasonably priced vehicles to work out of. Now they're in the luxury car price range and the beds are so high that if you can't just reach in to get something off the floor, you've got to crawl in there to get it.

[MeganC]

“We don’t even have driver less trains”

Yes, we do.

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

[Little Pig]

Most of the newer metro rail systems are, for all intents and purposes, driverless. There is an operator in the cab, but they don’t do much except to handle exceptions to normal operation. The computer does everything else, including station timing, opening and closing the doors, and speed between stops.

Big rail is still mostly manual, mostly (as noted) because of unions. Also, because the environment is relatively uncontrolled compared to a city subway system. The driver has to account for weather, diverse “consists”, and the occasional obstacle on the track (tree, moose, drunk railfan etc). I’m sure that if they could escape the unions, heavy rail would be one of the first to automate as much as possible. Either autonomous engines, or remote-piloted drone engines, would work just fine for most of what they do.