He didn't say that. He said they weren't ready to yet. I think he meant legally because his son is under 18 so their insurance wouldn't cover it and also it was employees only at the time so again their insurance wouldn't cover it.
I didn't get any sense he meant that he didn't trust the technology (otherwise he wouldn't be in it either).
People routinely take risks themselves they wouldn't impose on their kids.
It's much harder to believe that he didn't bring his son because of some weird insurance exclusion (presumably 1. they were insured for riders under 18 outside the vehicle and 2. he would have explicitly called out that it was a legal formality) than that this was extremely new technology which still had a reasonable chance of getting into a serious accident.
Not sure that means what you think it means. He might not have had regulatory or insurance permission to take non-employees in the car. Or it was just company policy to not allow family members (which would seem to be prudent before getting approval for general use), and he's being good and not using his position as CEO to get around the rules.
18+ is reasonable since it's still a dangerous experiment.
I actually would love an automated version of this that goes at 200 or 300 miles an hour, the ultimate thrill ride. Have it run on something like the Autobahn. While it's impossible for a human being to drive at that speed, computers definitely could .
I love it when the self driving threads always circle back to reinventing the concept of public transportation as if it doesn't already exist. Want to know what the best hyperloop system in the world is called? The subway, invented 200 years ago.
The fastest passenger cars today can only make it to 200mph. Even a computer with perfect vision and 0ms reaction time would not be able to stop in time for a blocked road at that speed unless visibility/road were perfect.
Maybe on roads in the Mojave Desert/South Dakota I90/etc?
I didn't get any sense he meant that he didn't trust the technology (otherwise he wouldn't be in it either).