I disagree about the fixing, because ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability. Once they dial in the costs and become scaled self sustaining operations, the incentive will be reduced opex.
I think the net improvements will come from the quantitative aspect of lots and lots of video. We don’t have good facts about these friction points on the road and rely on anecdotal information, police data (which sucks) and time/morion style studies.
The real cap is the operator ultimately is accountable.
When a software defect kills a bunch of people, the robot operator’s owners will subject to a way lower level of liability. Airlines have international treaties that do this.
An objectively safer future is common carriers operating mass transit. Robot taxi will creating a monster that will price out private ownership in the long term. Objectively safer remains to be seen, and will require a nationwide government regulatory body that won’t exist for many years.
Spoken by someone without knowledge of motor carrier regulation. That’s not a dig, few people are.
States are incredibly bad at regulating commercial entities. The Federal DOT contracts with a few universities (or at least they did) use evidence based sampling and enforcement, fulfilled by state authorities for trucks and buses in their scope. Only states like California, New York, Texas would have the resources to do it, and it would be really difficult to do anything effective when there’s 53 or more flavors.
even if we had good data, the major problem in the US is that the funding liabilities of transportation agencies generally massively outweighs revenues, particularly if legislators keep earmarking already limited funds for yet more road expansion in their districts.
I think the net improvements will come from the quantitative aspect of lots and lots of video. We don’t have good facts about these friction points on the road and rely on anecdotal information, police data (which sucks) and time/morion style studies.