Eventually they will be cheap. How much would you spend for a computer with the processing power of an iPhone in 1990? Thirty years from now that $100k tech package will be $500 and it will be orders of magnitude better.

When cars stop colliding with each other, safety standards can be relaxed. Get rid of heavy bumpers and structures added to withstand 50 mph offset crashes. The cars become very light weight which lets you decrease the size of the drivetrain and batteries. You end up with something closer to a fancy golf cart than a Camry and they will cost less than $10k.

Your 99.9999% argument doesn't sound right to me. In the US at least, we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to cars. We could eliminate thousands of deaths per year by simply limiting the top speed of all cars to 25 mph. But we don't because we are willing to accept the risk that comes along with 85 mph speeds (in Texas) for the convenience.

Would you also say we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to poisons and heights? Because your statement appears pretty hyperbolic to me when comparing some of the ways people die in the US.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/suicide.htm

> Would you also say we have a very high tolerance for danger when it comes to poisons and heights?

For poisons, absolutely. "Nearly all poisoning deaths in the United States are attributed to drugs" And we handle drug dangers very badly.

For heights, I don't know. Your link says falls which is not the same thing, especially when the elderly are involved. I couldn't find what fraction of those involved heights.

> When cars stop colliding with each other, safety standards can be relaxed. Get rid of heavy bumpers and structures added to withstand 50 mph offset crashes. The cars become very light weight which lets you decrease the size of the drivetrain and batteries. You end up with something closer to a fancy golf cart than a Camry and they will cost less than $10k.

A new Camry already most likely costs less than $10k to manufacture. Bumpers and frame aren’t expensive to manufacture, precision components are. The material and manufacturing savings you suggest would reduce the sticker price by $1-2k at best.

I totally agree with beefield, and like the idea of banning cars, however you're wrong about the tech cost. The only tech needed is a computer and some sensors, and computers aren't exactly expensive these days. The Tesla model S already has a fair amount of self-driving tech, and it costs well under $100k. Cameras aren't exactly expensive either; the big question mark is LIDAR, but some self-driving companies seem to be eschewing that in favor of pure-camera driving (though I really question if that's a good idea because LIDAR isn't affected by weather as much).

The bottom line is that the extra tech needed to make a car self-driving isn't very expensive, and the hardware costs are continually falling. The big problem is just software, which as we've seen with mobile phones, becomes very cheap when deployed en masse.

You have a point about the 9s, but given that our current (American) society places almost no emphasis on safety, and will happily let you drive around any piece-of-shit car you want in most places regardless of how unsafe it is, I have a very hard time believing society is suddenly going to demand 9-9s reliability from AutoCarOS.