thirdcrank wrote:I've no problem with a discussion. An earlier one was about whether these vehicles should be obliged to stick to speed limits or not in current conditions. I believe it would kill sales dead if they had to comply, rather than "keep up with traffic." This is a different issue to whether these vehicles are, or are capable of being, inherently safer than traditional vehicles. To contue with the monkey theme, it will suitthe marketing people if these vehicles can ape human behaviour, or self-interested "judgment."
It's never going to happen that a self driving car will be allowed to break the law.
What might happen (and what the OP is about) is that the law may change to allow special cases for them.
Perhaps the vehicle manufacturers will lobby for special consideration? Who knows.
But what manufacturer is going to risk a corporate manslaughter charge by knowingly allowing their product to break existing rules?
I'm pretty sure the answer is none.
thirdcrank wrote:And along with the manual driver, the cyclists and pedestrians will shifted out of the road.
We come back to this time and time and I don't understand why you think that.
The one place you cannot remove cyclists and pedestrians from is local roads.
And the hardest thing by far for a self driving car to do is navigate those roads.
Once it can do that then it can coexist happily with them on any road thereby negating any need to remove them.
The example I gave above is about motorways and the only reason it makes sense there is because motorways are designed for fast moving traffic and nothing else.
Your average A roads can never ban manual cars, motorbikes or bicycles because they're not suited to high speed, nose to tail traffic and more importantly because in the absence of alternatives they join all the bits those vehicles use to get around.
The best transport system will be one that gets the automatic cars onto motorways and away from minor roads and if we have fast self drive only motorways then it's a no brainer since they'll out perform A roads by an order of magnitude.
Where self driving cars use A roads it'll be for local journeys and there'll be no point blasting along at high speed because the time saved would be teeny compared to the risk (not to mention the cost of having to maintain those roads at a level suitable for such high speed traffic).