[digital-cygnet]

Self-driving cars decrease the internal costs of driving (allowing you to do it without having to pay attention) while keeping the external costs (congestion, danger, pollution, noise, etc) basically the same. So we'll end up with more driving, with society at large bearing the cost.

Locking this future in for good because of "present infrastructure" would be short-sighted.

[neuronexmachina]

> keeping the external costs (congestion, danger, pollution, noise, etc)

Are there actually self-driving car services that aren't EV-based? Just that helps with several of those criteria, and they're substantially less dangerous than human-driven vehicles.

[TRiG_Ireland]

Electronic vehicles are, frankly, only marginally better. Cars have far more negative effects than tailpipe emissions.

[ben_w]

Yes, but this is about self-driving cars and the point being made is that those in turn are also all electric, not directly about EVs.

Unfortunately for all the improvements in the tech, self-driving is only now roughly at the level that Tesla claimed to have already achieved a decade ago with their "Paint It Black" video, which makes it difficult to say if we ever get benefits significantly beyond "emergency stops for things you didn't personally see":

Smaller parking lots because the car can drop you off at the door and then put itself somewhere without enough room to open doors? Dunno. Situational awareness and fleet communication to safely allow perfect bumpers-in-contact slipstreaming at 120 MPH, keeping down energy costs while also reducing travel times and allowing narrower roads with fewer lanes? Perhaps not. Using WiFi or whatever to directly contact other vehicles on the road, eliminate the need for so much horn honking? Not yet, that's for sure.

And so on.

I'd like self-driving to fix all the problems the sci-fi vision says it could, but even with a million times the experience of a typical human driver, current machine learning clearly just isn't generalising the way I expected it to back in 2009 when I was wowed by the developments and took self-driving cars seriously.

If self-driving does fix as many negatives as possible (and again, I know this is presently an "if"), what remains? I assume one thing would be the commuter belts get even deeper as speeds go up because the long-term historical trend is commute time is constant regardless of speed, but that's the only thing I can think of?