| You don't even need humans for safety features to become a problem: Every day, I drive on a road that goes through the German woods. The road is barely wide enough for two average-sized cars to pass each other. If one car is wider than average, then one of the cars has to go off the road onto the dirt-and-stones shoulder. The speed limit there is 60km/h. Nearly all the humans drive 80. If you drive 60 there, you will cause a queue to form behind you, because there is so much traffic on that 5km stretch of road. The reason why I consider this to be such a good example is because there is no solution here for self-driving cars that will work in the real world. If you just put self-driving cars as they are on that road, then you'll convert it into a giant traffic jam. Of course, the only _logical_ way forward would be to widen that road so that it can actually sustain its traffic load, but that is not a real-world solution. Because a) The local levels of government are too broke to fix all the roads like this even on a time scale of decades (!) and b) the road was built on the private property of local nobility in the 1920s (for weird historical reasons) and they have refused to give up the land for the road to be widened on at least one occasion in the past. Now, this is Germany, possibly the most orderly car-nation on the planet. What about Italy? Or India? Or South Africa? Self-driving vehicles will become ubiquitous on the Autobahns and in rectangular American cities. I would be very surprised if there were still many human truck drivers doing cross-Europe tours 30 years from now. But human-driven cars will not disappear in the lifetime of anybody reading this, simply because outside of a few well-planned environments, you have to bend the rules to maintain traffic flow. |