I dunno. Americans seem to want these giant 4x4s even when they leave the city twice a year; they'd be better off (certainly safer... most trucks are more dangerous for other people and for the occupants) if they had a little car for city driving and rented the off road cargo hauler when they needed it.

A city-only car would be totally useful for people who live in cities; you just rent something when you want to go to the boonies.

Heck, most BEVs are that way now; I've got like 120 miles of range on mine, which is fine almost all the time. the two or three times a year I need something with more range or with more cargo capacity or what have you, I borrow or rent.

I think that the economics of the first level5 cars might be similar to current BEVs, in that you can only go where there is infrastructure. which is where most of us go most of the time.

Sure there are niche markets where fully self-driving and self-driving only cars may make sense.

But they still need to handle fault cases: e.g. they cannot only rely on a beacon sent by traffic lights because that beacon or the whole traffic light might out of order. So, imho, while smart infrastructure may help self-driving cars and traffic management it does not allow you to avoid the "hard work", which to make sure self-driving cars will behave safely and reasonably completely on their own.

eh, my argument is that as long as they are intelligent enough to safely get to the side of the road, I think there's a very large number of people who would be okay with a car that "broke down" every 10K miles if it was otherwise great. (heck, I've been in some sort of breakdown or accident in an uber more often than that, even not counting app failures, so people would probably tolerate a lot more than that if the things were really self-driving.)

Note, you still have the safety problems to solve. You need to know how to get out of the road if the road infrastructure is on the blink. I'm just saying that "I don't know what to do so I will pull over" as long as it doesn't happen too often, is an acceptable answer.

more to the point, for "full self driving" even with infrastructure, the "don't hit unexpected pedestrians" technology needs to get way better. You probably can regulate transponders in cars. You probably can't regulate transponders on children.

> All of this discussion on smart infrastructure is moot, imho, because it won't be guaranteed to be there on all roads and cars will have to be designed to work even when the smart infrastructure breaks down.

Also, a vast majority of the world doesn't even have proper roads like many western countries do.

In many parts of the world a road is not even paved or asphalted, and let's not forget what is actually making use of that road.

Seeing animals on roads might be a rare sight in a western country, but in much of the world, the road is shared by more then just passenger cars and trucks.