Comment by lll-o-lll
3 years ago
It’s because self driving doesn’t provide much value until you can remove the human. If you can remove the human, last mile package delivery is suddenly super cheap; taxis are cheap; trucking is much cheaper; share car services are transformed as a business model.
With the human still required you get nothing, so why invest at all?
I think a lot of people would be happy to put their feet up once they'd navigated onto a highway, or have their car go find a parking spot by itself, or come back from one. The sort of stuff Tesla is trying to do is in many ways far more practical except they keep diverting resources to FSD and end up not nailing thee more prosaic conveniences.
The cost benefit analysis just doesn’t add up though. I can see this adding a small amount to the purchasing decision of a prospective buyer, but without “remove the human” as the end goal these technologies do not provide the return on investment. No one has a crystal ball though, and a few years ago “autonomous vehicles” looked promising. It’s just that we are now looking at the sunken cost fallacy when it hasn’t worked out.
You get safer drivers, less crashes and less death.