this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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The only way to solve the self driving cat issue is to ban all human drivers from the road.
So, if some techbro wants self driving cars, just give everybody one. All electric of course.
My hope has always been that if self driving cars are successful, almost nobody will own a personal car.
Cars are massively wasteful. Put aside the idea you're hauling around multiple tonnes of steel and glass frequently to just move one person. Ignore the pollution aspect too. They're also wasteful because they're used for maybe 2 hours per day, and the other 22 they just sit somewhere taking up space and getting rusty.
Just think about how many stationary cars you pass when you're out in the world. Nobody's getting any use out of them, they're just sitting there in case they're needed, meanwhile they're taking up useful space. There are other potentially expensive things you only use for a short amount of time each day: say, a good kitchen knife. But, most of them are indoors where they're not exposed to the elements and deteriorating without being used.
In a future with self-driving cars, owning a car could be a luxury that enthusiasts could pay for, if it was worth it to them, but everybody else who needed a car could just rent a car for an hour or two.
I think that is the difference of perspective. Living in Germany, I did my driver's license with 22, didn't need it before. I could live without a car.
Yes, many would profit from shared, autonomous cars. But many would profit from public transport here in Germany to, and guess what. They want cars.
I hate this as much as the next dude. But if they really really want them, at least make them electric
Or make motorcycles more popular ;)
And very expensive.
So only the rich can afford them?
Yes
...and cyclists, and pedestrians, and farm tractors, and horses, and wagons, and stray pets, and wildlife, and...
Cyclist belong on their bicycle lanes , and those lanes belong besides every road.
Pedestrians belong on walkways, along every road
What is about stray pets and railroads? Horses , dogs, cats?
If we are talking about something so unrealistic and futuristic like autonomous vehicles lvl 5+. We may as well assume that we fixed everything else at that point of time.
Or, we just can take this as what it is. A sarcastic joke
Cyclists and pedestrians shouldn't be on the road.
Unless you're in the US (my condolences) you have a footpath/sidewalk/pavement for walking.
Bikes should (but rarely do) have their own physically seperated infrastructure, so they're not getting hit by cars/busses/trucks/etc and not hitting pedestrians.
Cyclists can go on the road just fine, as long as the road is built and regulated for more than just cars
No, bikes should never be on Roads.
Streets, yes, Roads, no.
Eh, it depends. Faster bike traffic shouldn't really be in such close proximity to pedestrians. On a lot of city streets, a fast bike is way closer to the speed of a car than to a pedestrian. City centers, especially non arterials, I'd say they should be in the street if there's no path. I'm not particularly fast at just under 30kph and it's rare for traffic to be much faster downtown here, especially non arterials I'm often passing them. I think that's generally too fast to safely ride on a sidewalk, but a safe speed there would make cycling not very practical for me.
Which I can assure, unfortunately, no cycle paths is often the case in my part of eastern/central Europe
Giving everybody a self-driving car completely defeats the purpose. Human-driven cars spend about 23 hours of each day just sitting around. A car that can drive itself doesn't need to spend any time being parked - it can provide another ride! Liberally assuming a self-driving car would need to spend a full half of its time (12 hours/day) charging or being serviced, that would still mean that replacing all cars with autonomous vehicles could reduce traffic volume by a theoretical limit of 12× (12 hours/day/vehicle vs. 1 hour/day/vehicle).
you're forgetting here that all people want to commute at the same time between 7am and 9am in the morning. so you can't just operate 1 vehicle 24 hours around, you need the vehicles for these two hours especially and then some in the afternoon.
Elimination of personal vehicles would make public transit more attractive; with the previously foregone conclusion that one must own a vehicle gone, the choice is between a few dollars for transit, or several times more than that for a private vehicle. How many people currently choose to take an Uber or Lyft to and from work?
Also, it's certainly not all people, nor all commuters.
Is that realistic, though? A car is already a status toy, what's to stop conspicuous consumption in the form of buying one's own self-driving car? Or, say, moving to a cheaper house further from the city, because commute time can now be used as work time? Shared cars won't work in that scenario.
Also, rush hour is still a thing. There have to be enough UAVs to handle peak demand, and then most of them will be parked somewhere, idle most of the time. Or running errands. Traffic congestion is bad enough now, with average vehicle occupancy of 1.2 people; it'll be apocalyptic when that number drops below one.
Also, in cities with sky-high housing costs, i guarantee that people will live in self-driving RVs, because road space is "free."
In short, the only way to realize the benefits of the shared UAV future is to ban private car ownership, and cap the number of UAVs in a city. That sounds a lot like a train, except trains' enormous capacity offers better service.
I doubt that we'll be seeing UAVs for personal transport anytime soon. Terrestrial vehicles are significantly easier to manage.
The main thing that will prevent people from purchasing their own AVs will be availability. Waymo and Zoox, for example, are running services, not selling their multi-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicles to the general public. (I'm not bothering to address Tesla as their autonomy stack is an industry joke.)
Elimination of personal vehicles would make public transit more attractive; with the previously foregone conclusion that one must own a vehicle gone, the choice is between a few dollars for transit, or several times more than that for a private vehicle. How many people currently choose to take an Uber or Lyft to and from work?
Also, trains don't have curbside service.
UAV meaning Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle. (In contrast to rideshare services, like Uber. When they were heavily subsidized, it must be noted, they increased traffic congestion.) Availability of them will increase. The reason that we have an auto-dominated landscape today is that car makers wanted to sell more cars. There's approximately 0% chance that car makers today will be satisfied selling a limited number of vehicles for ride services, when they could sell vastly more cars to individuals.
UAV already stands for "unmanned aerial vehicle." Besides, using both "unmanned" and "autonomous" is redundant. Anyway, the standard abbreviation for autonomous vehicles is AV.
Buggy whip salesmen gonna have to deal with it.
I suppose a vehicle that is being driven by remote control is unmanned but not autonomous.
Sure, but an autonomous vehicle is by definition unmanned.
An autonomous vehicle doesn't (in theory) require a driver, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have one.
Show me where the driver goes in this:
https://zoox.com/
Well sure, that particular autonomous vehicle can't have a driver, but a Waymo Jaguar I-Pace could have a driver, and is also an autonomous car.
Well, it's a car with some fancy shit on it. Not sure if it can really be called an autonomous vehicle.
Why would it reduce traffic volume? The cars that are on the road are the ones that are currently in their hour of driving that day, it would more reduce the size of parking lots and parking space allocation, or at least move it to charging hubs away from where people congregate.
Which would in turn affect city design, letting buildings be placed closer together, making it so you don't have to drive as far, which would then reduce traffic.
I think the reduction would be slight versus the reduction realised by improving the quality of existing human operated public transport like buses and trains. A mass transit system relying on individual automated cars is a tech bro brain fart.
Elimination of personal vehicles would make public transit more attractive; with the previously foregone conclusion that one must own a vehicle gone, the choice is between a few dollars for transit, or several times more than that for a private vehicle. How many people currently choose to take an Uber or Lyft to and from work?
Yeah it would be better still if we we had actual improved public transport systems for carry more people at once rather than automated personal vehicles, even if those automated personal vehicles are shared like taxis. The cost of automation and requirement for removing all other vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists and animals from the roads is immediately removed and the benefits obtained by reducing traffic is immediately realised just by using human driven buses and trains.
Well, one of them is happening faster than the other, so let's not perfect be the enemy of good.
Not really, battery-electric cars can double as your household battery bank.
It seems a lot cheaper to buy a battery bank than to spend a sizeable fraction of a million dollars for the rest of the AV and the operational costs.
Get rid of privately owned cars and you might be on to something. If the state owned a fleet of self driving cars you could rent at the car library, that would probably be better than everyone having their own car they park somewhere most of the time.
Building walkable living spaces with mass transit would be better for more people environmentally, economically, health-wise, socially...
Until Trump or equivalent decides you're not allowed to leave the city because you posted some nasty things about him.
Forcing non-private ownership means everyone is at the mercy of the state allowing them to borrow transport. How long before the Gays aren't allowed to drive? Women can't drive? That's the future your espousing.
Do you have the same fear about trains?
Well, nobody's gonna be able to afford an actual working autonomous vehicle, and it won't make sense either economically or operationally to privately own one even if they could.