those cars could be in every city and they’d run great (except snow. snow is tough, rain not so much)
but why aren’t driverless cars there?
It’s been decided you want a perfect track record, as close to flawless - to appease regulation bodies.
regulation is what kills and regulation is the biggest fear. The cars and tech are always getting better, the ‘slowness’ is deliberate, the bet is on the future.
This is why I feel China will be the first to have unlimited self-driving. They would be able to treat self-driving cars the way that we treat trains: liability on the person hit by the train, so long as the train was functioning properly.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/09/why-drivers-in-c...
The inability to operate in conditions where people are most likely to not be able to use active transportation seems like a pretty major flaw.
This isn't an accurate description of SF, but more importantly, the sun doesn't come out at night.
My point wasn't that sunshine specifically helps, but that the complete lack of snow, ice and other roadway altering weather conditions is a serious asterisk that needs to be solved before this technology can be moved out of Beta for most of the US.
Self_driving cars seemingly can't handle snowy conditions. 70% of the roads in the US receive at least five inches of snow per year. (https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/weather/weather_events/snow_ice.htm)
At this point, driverless taxis are more science fiction than reality for a supermajority of Americans, let alone the rest of the world.
Meanwhile up in Canada, I'm still struggling with the fact that google has completely mislabeled two of the streets that touch my corner lot, and invented a through street that has never existed on my neighbors property. All of this is information that I have submitted a correction to, as well as being available through our excellent public GIS system.
The existence of these sorts of ambiguities in the map, and in the real world means that driverless taxis will be doing exactly what the poor pizza guy does periodically and wandering down my dead end road thinking they are on a completely different street. Luckily the pizza guy has the ability to knock on my door and get directions, while a driverless car will just... turn on its flashers and block the road as far as I can tell.
When driverless cars can operate in Salt Lake City, a city that is incredibly tech friendly, low regulation, car centric, but with genuinely bad weather I will be impressed. In the meantime I would settle for more frequent bus service.