California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B

Re:California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B by CPLX on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @06:43PM (#16173173)

> Buy a fully autonomous car

Make sure you put a winged pony on the shopping list too. They're a great fashionable match any time you're making fantasies of acquiring things that don't exist.

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Re:California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B by jhall1468 on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @07:09PM (#16173357)

At least one of those is far closer to reality than the other.

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Re:California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B by chipotle_coyote on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @08:53PM (#16173981)

While that's true, the less flippant question is whether fully autonomous cars -- where "fully autonomous" is defined as being able to climb in one, kick back and do your work with no concern the way you conceivably could on a train -- will (a) exist, (b) be road-legal, (c) be widely available, and (d) be generally affordable within a timeframe that makes a high-speed rail line moot. I don't think that's remotely a given.

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Re:California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B by Animats on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @09:05PM (#16174034)

We're going to have autonomous cars that can drive SF-LA long before we have high-speed rail. Self-driving cars from the big players are planned for the 2020-2021 model years.

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Re:California bullet train cost surges by $2.8B by CPLX on Wednesday January 17, 2018 @09:18PM (#16174106)

I have this weird feeling that before we have many of them in mass production, we'll have a single car that fits this description.

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