[gambiting]

I don't dismiss the benefits of automated driving on society, literally everything you said is true and I agree with it 100% - I'm just saying that I feel like the tech isn't anywhere near ready for mass deployment, it feels like a gimmick or a really fancy adaptive cruise control at best, or that people who talk about it come from a Star Wars universe where being surrounded by super high-tech stuff is just normal and indistinguishable from magic.

Seeing the current state of the best-of-the-best from Tesla and Deimler, autonomous driving is decent, but it seems full of the same issues as image recognition - and that was predicted to take at most few years to perfect 50 years ago. Today in 2017 you can fool the best image recognition algorithm with a sofa in a zebra print - it comes with 90% confidence match for a zebra because the pattern is right. I firmly stand by my feeling that getting to anything approaching L5 autonomy will take half a century, and that's not near future in my mind.

[njarboe]

Imagine in the middle of every American interstate a light-weight, elevated track holding up a lane in each direction designed for automated cars. Tech today could easily drive vehicles in such a controlled space at high speed and density. Switch to manual upon exit. At 100mph and 40ft per car one gets a rate of 13200 cars per hour. This is on par with the capacity of the current 5 lane Bay Bridge at 9,000 per hour [1]. This could be the future, if society could embrace it. (Electric?) automatic cars would be adopted very quickly if you got to use such a system for commuting and cross country travel. As driving tech got better cars could travel right next to each other on long trips to get the aerodynamic benefits of trains. Google, Apple - you have billions sitting around. How about building a demo track and start building the system on the 280 and 101 for a nice loop.

[1] Wish I had a better reference (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Peak-hour-...)