What are you anticipating for the automated driving adoption rate? I’m expecting extremely low as most people cannot afford new cars. We are talking probably decades before there are enough automated driving cars to fundamentally alter traffic in such a way as to entirely eliminate human driving culture.

In response to the “humans are fallible” bit ill remark again that algorithms are very fallible. Statistically, even. And while lots of automated algorithms are controlling life and death machines, try justifying that to someone who’s entire family is killed by an AI. How do they even receive compensation for that? Who is at fault? A family died. With human drivers we can ascribe fault very easily. With automated algorithms fault is less easily ascribed and the public writ large is going to have a much harder time accepting that.

Also, with natural gas and other systems there are far fewer variables than a busy freeway. There’s a reason why it hasn’t happened until recently. Hundreds of humans all in control of large vehicles moving in a long line at speed is a very complicated environment with many factors to consider. How accurately will algorithms be able to infer driving intent based on subtle movement of vehicles in front of and behind it? How accurate is the situational awareness of an algorithm, especially when combined road factors are involved?

Its just not as simple as its being made out to be. This isnt a chess problem, its not a question of controlling train cars on set tracks with fixed timetables and universal controllers. The way cars exist presently is very, very open ended. I agree that if 80+% of road vehicles were automated it would have such an impact on road culture as to standardize certain behaviors. But we are very, very far away from that in North America. Most of the people in my area are driving cars from the early 2010s. Its going to be at least a decade before any sizable amount of vehicles are current year models. And until then algorithms have these obstacles that cannot easily be overcome.

Its like I said earlier, the last 10% of optimization requires an exponentially larger amount of energy and development than the first 90% does. Its the same problem faced with other forms of automation. And a difference of 10% in terms of performance is… huge when it comes to road vehicles.