I just really don't understand the whole self-driving car craze. What is so attractive about it? Why do people want it so badly? Personally, I like driving, rarely even use cruise control. I would never fully trust these auto-pilots. Ever. So what's the point? If I can't crawl into the backseat and take a nap and wake up at my destination, then what's the use?
I agree with these sentiments, but for slightly different reasons.
One of the main selling points is that commuters can save time (the focus on self driving cars, not trucks/rail). However, long commutes are mostly a constraint imposed by suburban sprawl and associated planning failures. The same applies to automated delivery mechanisms from shops, again of limited use in sufficiently dense communities. In such a scenario, this feels a lot like optimizing 1% of execution time in a program.
For large scale transport of goods or people, the same situation applies for the economics - the labor of the driver should be a small fraction of the operating costs.
There could be some safety benefits, but this remains uncertain. I found https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-05-28/cars-will... quite interesting in this respect.
Seeing what happened with the invention of the automobile, I won't be surprised if self driving cars become the norm somehow. In the most extreme case there might be an outright ban on non autonomous cars at some point in the future. This is something I certainly don't look forward to.
Because there's driving and driving. I like driving too but when you are on the highway there's nothing rewarding, it's not driving if you only drive straight. The future is to lean back and do nothing like the google car. Or Little train in road.
