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Cars won't save us from cars. Having widely available self driving car would save some lives but also set off another front in the culture wars and won't lead to significant changes in our infrastructure or how the burdens of mass driving are distributed.

The common point that you won't see huge structural improvements until human driven cars are gone is true and it's going to be a WHILE.

Even if you had perfect self driving technology the cultural and political capital you'd have to expend to get rid of recreational cars is just astronomical. At that point you may as well ban all of the fucking things, the electric ones aren't better they just shovel the suffering around a bit.

[zaroth]

Just because L5 autonomy doesn’t solve every possible externality of driving, doesn’t mean it isn’t a watershed moment in human technological innovation and also massively life-saving and harm-reducing.

The externalities of driving are huge (both positive and negative) but the negative externality of driving accidents is nearly a trillion dollars per year in the US.