But we should expect that this transition will be very similar to the transition from horses to cars. The first cars were unreliable and unsafe and didn't work well on roads designed for horses. But as cars improved the advantages quickly became huge and demand for horses dropped quickly.
The same situation is happening with Tesla. FSD is unreliable and unsafe today but once it hits an inflection point the advantages are so big more and more people become willing to accept the downsides.
Early cars were designed as [carriages with the horses removed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseless_carriage). It would not be until many years later until we saw car designs that leveraged the unique technological advantages of horseless cars to deliver designs that looked and functioned nothing like horse-drawn carriages. We're still at this stage with automated driving.
As automated vehicles become more commonplace, we'll see designs that leverage the inherent benefits of automaton. For example, we might see designs that essentially function as moving living rooms, bedrooms or meeting rooms on wheels. We might see other designs that resemble small busses, where groups of people travelling to geographically proximate locations can carpool into a single automated vehicle. Heck, we might even see something like moving diners on wheels (potentially serving several clients at once), because why wouldn't you want to eat a hot breakfast in the "car" while on the way to the airport or work.
Once these new designs and use cases become commonplace, people in the future will view our car designs as increasingly archaic and restrictive (just like how we view horse-drawn carriages today).
If you can sleep comfortably as your car drives you from SF to LA, it is a game-changer. If you can WFH from your car as you commute to the office for mid-morning meetings, you can live farther from town.
Removing the labor costs of having a driver allows everyone to experience the transformative benefits of having a chauffeur. Rich people like chauffeurs because they buy time, the most-precious commodity.
It’s annoying to drive a car, but a self driving car isn’t going to massively change things. The bottleneck in most road systems are where they interface with pedestrians and cyclists (one can only cross the street so fast); self driving cars might improve highway capacities but the bottleneck is usually a backup from too many people coming or going on the same ramp into a traffic light.
The big deal is the second order effects. Cars can driver 50 MPH so we build highways and now we can have suburbs.
For autonomy it means that logistics systems can be centrally planned and programmed like never before with no need to factor in the human costs or restraints around sleeping, stopping for food, etc. Then the third order effects of that are very hard to predict
Motorbikes are a thing. Apart from weight/balance relationships to control, many riders are "take control from my dead hands" types so I don't think the market will easily convert to self-driving.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. Maybe motorcycles will fade out or be banned. I will enjoy mine while I can.
So we can put an end to all the death they cause, and the pollution they create.
Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is electrification, not automated cars.
Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey, we are allowing driverless rides on very well mapped roads!" situation. How many years have they been almost at that point already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing any consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier' driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast by comparison.