[phkn1]

‘In the distant future people may outlaw driver cars. You can’t have a person operating a two-ton death machine!’

I don't care how good the design is, people will always require a way to take control when they wish. The trick will probably be to make the UX (passenger experience - PX?) so much easier than driving that nobody will want to.

But outlaw them? Nah...

[manicdee]

I am not allowed to take control of the plane I am flying in today. It is actually illegal to do so and I face severe penalties for even trying.

Same deal for taxis, busses, trams, cable-cars, ferris wheels and ferries.

We have modes of transport we do not control, where attempting to take control is illegal.

Why not the same for cars? They will simply be self-driving taxis after all.

[phkn1]

Because you don't own any of those things. If you own your own plane and have a pilot's license, you are more than welcome to fly it yourself and to disengage the autopilot should the situation demand it.

I wouldn't mind an autonomous car-share service. Just saying that Musk's futurist vision of mandatory self-driving vehicles is incompatible with personal control of personal technology, and practically, politically infeasible in the US anytime soon.

[TeMPOraL]

Will they? You have zero control over the bus, or if they're driven by a chauffeur. For all intents and purposes, such vehicles are self-driving, just with some meat brain instead of a silicon one doing the thinking.

Also note that in both of my examples, you're not the owner of the vehicle. With self-driving cars there will be little reason to own a car, and such the need for having control will be smaller.

[phkn1]

Right, an autonomous ride-share car service would be ideal in its capacity to reduce the need for personal car ownership. But even so, technology is fallible in extenuating circumstances, and human intervention will always be needed as a recourse.

[TeMPOraL]

> But even so, technology is fallible in extenuating circumstances, and human intervention will always be needed as a recourse.

I disagree. The basic assumption for banning human drivers on public road is that the technology will reach the level of being strictly superior in terms of driving safely. At this point letting humans drive is just very stupid.

[benologist]

Pretty easy to imagine manually driven cars (one day) becoming "not street legal", while still legal to own and drive on private tracks etc as with current exotic/powerful cars.