[harshreality]

I don't think they're mutually exclusive.

When level 5 self-driving is available, it won't be too difficult to add a wheel back and have modes where the self-driving capability maintains safety for other drivers on the road, but allows the driver to assume some risk for their own car and personal safety.

Different modes could allow the driver to accept different levels of risk to themselves and of their car, while still providing automatic protection and avoidance of other drivers on the road. Probably some more... extreme... modes could require posting a bond with the insurance company or government to cover personal injury.

If someone doesn't mind risking their car (collision insurance would no longer apply in these modes), and can pay for any injuries they sustain, as long as they aren't risking other people's health and safety, the computer could let them drive how they want, within certain risk limits.

I'm not so sure people will bother, though. Once car-to-car transponders are mandatory, creating an intelligent grid of vehicle awareness, what fun is it to zoom around other cars as if they're stationary if they know you're coming?

I don't believe people want the actual risk associated with aggressive driving. They just want to beat other drivers. Computer games should take up most of the slack. Even really simple games like Race The Sun offer plenty of adrenaline and reflex development with no actual risk. If you want actual (substantial) risk, go rock climb above your ability, or skydive without a reserve chute.

[gambiting]

This here is one of the reasons why I think manual cars will never go away, or at least they won't be banned outright - new cars will have enough systems to stop you from crashing in almost every situation, while allowing you to "drive" - so why ban it?

[xoa]

I'm not sure what you mean by "manual cars" there. When there are discussions about future bans on "manual cars" that means cars as we have them right now, without any sort of level 5 automatic control. A theoretical level 5 car that also lets drivers have control for fun as long as some set of conditions are continuously met wouldn't be a "manual car" I think, it'd be a self-driving car with an operator recreation mode as allowed by local laws/ordinances. In that situation the system is always ready to take back over should a condition fail, or for that matter should the driver merely decide they want it to. If you meant though that there would be a mix of manual and self-driving cars allowed because the self-driving ones have collision avoidance, then that doesn't make sense, as a manual car could still create collisions that were unavoidable (even by accident). It's not like self-driving cars have force fields.

Having said all that, even if we're talking only about "manual modes" in l5 rather then "manual cars", there are still reasons why they might be banned or at least massively restricted in general, and that's due to infrastructure economics, not crashes. Well developed L5 cars will be capable of operating with a level of precision (in terms of actual road lines and such) and reliability that is beyond the general population, so once all cars reach that level it significantly changes how roads and support infrastructure themselves can be designed. Purely self-driving vehicles simply won't need the lanes to be as wide for example, which directly translates into newly available free space on exisitng roads. That could be used to make them purely thinner (less paving = massive cost savings), gain an extra mechanized vehicle lane for free (higher capacity for the same price), maintain existing numbers of lanes but gain new lanes for walkers/bikers, or some combination. There will be a lot of minor to radical optimizations available with significant economic and quality of life benefits, so long as you don't have to worry about having human drivers at all. That's probably going to tempt a lot of jurisdictions sooner or later.