[Efthreeoh]

Originally Posted by STK

Let's tap this down a bit. There are really two issues we've been discussing. The first is whether and if autonomous vehicles will become viable. The second is what effect that would have on the legacy cars and their owners.

On the first point, I think the momentum is enormous. The investments by private companies around the world and there valuations are now well in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Further, many governments have made comments to support this transition. A lot of the technology is semiconductor based which has an extremely long and somewhat predictable history in terms of progress. Some of the technology is sensor technology which is also progressing at a brisk rate. The speed of the AI advancements is more problematic and creates more uncertainty.

I'm not convinced the regulatory hurdles will get in the way. The states have been very proactive already and while the trial lawyers will get their share. it won't prevent the transition. For one thing, driving is already very unsafe. The current system allows 30,000 deaths a year and the trial lawyers haven't stopped the use of cars. In addition, the cost savings in both time and money at the personal and commercial level would drive the process.

The analogy of space travel to Mars doesn't seem right. Space exploration has primarily been a nonprofit government project until recently. And the private sector does make money launching satellites. No one is going to make any money going to Mars. Autonomous vehicles, on the other hand, are a goldmine if they work, from both a private and a public sector perspective. So all the incentives are there except for the legacy technologies that would lose out. And I don't see them standing in the way. They're all trying to join the revolution. The transitions from cathode ray technology to digital imagery technology or from silver halide photography to digital photography are a lot better analogies than colonizing Mars. Of course, this is a lot harder, but the rewards are a lot bigger.

On the second point - the transition from IC cars to fleet owned autonomous electric cars - is purely a matter of speed of adoption, which boils down to cost savings. Those cost savings are likely to be greatest in urban areas and in long--haul trucking. Since self-driven IC cars will be getting in the way of those cost savings (including public health issues), they will be slowly restricted. That might come in the form of which areas can be entered, which lanes can be used, or other forms of control.

This isn't flying cars or Star Trek transporters or space colonization. And for what it's worth, I'm not an early adopter, gee-wiz, kinda guy. And maybe I'm being too optimistic about the speed of AI integration. But the writing is on the wall.

I think that the early progressors of AV tech have been Google and company. They have an image problem where people would rather text each other than drive themselves, so the investment for them makes sense. The auto manufacturers follow suit since Google and company have serious excess financial resources to technologically and politically drive the change. Considering the auto tech companies have far more experience in making vehicles than Google and a lot to lose, it makes sense they will jump in. If AVs are to be a goldmine for profits, that only means the transportation cost per mile goes up rather than down for the consumer.

I used the analogy of space travel in the sense of tech advancement rather than profit motive. If already said, I just want to see a real transition plan.

It's an interesting topic.