[ichabod1]

A bit of an argument ad absurdum, but it’s occurred to me that in a driverless car world, your car would never exceed the speed limit. It would take forever to get from point A to point B going 30 mph, for example.

[tet68]

But liberal logic would tell you that since everyone
is going 30 mph. it wouldn’t make any difference since
there would be no velocity inequality.

[Smittie]

A bit of an argument ad absurdum, but it’s occurred to me that in a driverless car world, your car would never exceed the speed limit. It would take forever to get from point A to point B going 30 mph, for example.

And just what is going to mean for all those podunk towns who set up their speed traps to fund their coffers?

[RedStateRocker]

Well, if all cars were self driving the routing could easily be many times more efficient. Consider how much time is wasted at intersections because of sub optimal timing or sensing. Pretty easy for a program to take the data of all of the cars and route everything in the best manner, if I understand correctly that's pretty much how data packets move on the internet so the math is well known.

I think self driving cars are going to replace taxis first. They will be really expensive to start, but the economics of not having to pay drivers will make economic sense in densely populated areas even if a self driving Prius costs $200k as it will be able to function 24/7 except for fueling and maintenance.

They might make a lot of sense in cities where they can be coordinated with each other, lights, bridges, crosswalks exactly like a data network. Next will probably be big rigs, perhaps with a hub outside of the city area where a human driver can board and take the rig the last few miles.

I rather like the idea of some of this functionality for the straight stretches of long trips, slightly slower speed would often be made up for by being able to read or sleep for a bunch of hours on a long interstate drive; 80 through Nevada, for example.