As technology advances rapidly, self-driving cars are no longer just a futuristic concept—they’re becoming a reality on our roads. Companies like Tesla, Waymo, and others are testing autonomous vehicles with increasing success. But are cities truly ready for this transformation?
What do you think:
Will self-driving cars reduce traffic congestion and accidents?
How will they impact jobs in driving-based industries (like trucking or ride-hailing)?
Should governments start redesigning infrastructure to support autonomous vehicles?
Would you personally feel safe in a fully self-driving car?
Let’s discuss! Share your thoughts and concerns about how autonomous vehicles might reshape the future of mobility.
Barely self driving, is outperformed by a smarphone mounted on your dashboard. Very unsafe in any weather but a well lit spring day.
People on the other side of the world mostly piloting, not totally autonomous.
To me we’re 50 or more years at least away from fully atonomous driving cars going around.
The problem lies mostly in the fact that human and atonomous vehicles are sharing the road, alongside very immature tech that’s trying to be as cheap as possible to make the auto makers richer.
We need systems that can emulate human driving because roads are made for us, not robots. If markings aren’t on the road or our view is partially obstructed by an object we can still navigate the situation. Current systems struggle badly. We can make complex assumptions on the world around us and react accordingly, we can “read” intentions in other drivers (like seeing someone trying to turn without a turn signal because we see a road ahead and the wheels are already slightly turned to manouver, for example).
I don’t think it’s feasable in any imaginable future.
I have experience with very basic driver asisstance. Adaptive cruise control has usually been fine for me. Lane keep is dogshit in the cars I drove. So I’d say maybe, I’d need a few city miles to figure it out.
tl;dr It’s either us or robots on the road, sharing is too complicated and will require tens of years of development, both in software and hardware.
I have a Tesla model 3 as my daily driver. FSD (tesla’s self driving stack) is the main reason I went with this vehicle. I use FSD about 90% of the time and I will say its come a long way this year. That being said its nowhere near ready for Unsupervised in its current state. It is however really good when it works, now if it would only do that reliably.
I think in the future there will be some great options for people who either can’t or don’t want to operate a vehicle. Using the tech daily makes that future feel a bit further away than the current manufacturers would have you believe.
I think the main issue is there is a ton of media hype about the pros and cons and people seem to form opinions based on this without trying the tech or digging into the actual data. Though i suppose this is true for many topics.
It’s still in it infancy in my opinion. I really don’t think it will be fully viable within city’s for another decade(at a minimum). It will probably be largely viable for highway/interstates within the next decade, but I don’t think it will be reliable enough that it would make sense to fully forgo having a steering wheel and a licensed driver. Thinking semi-trailer trucks will be the first vehicles to really see this in a meaningful manner.
No, as humans will still be involved in the process at a some level for the foreseeable future. Accidents could become less common and likely where the largest benefit will be had, but I don’t think traffic will appreciably improve except for accident induced traffic. The real solution to traffic is better public transit. Less cars = Less traffic and will even reduce car accidents further than what autonomous car would ever be able to do.
Really hard to tell, but I think you will see pay go down for ride hailing. Trucking is very hard to tell as of right now, but if it’s viable enough for interstate travel I could see it causing a lot of jobs to go away.
No, there aren’t enough and may never be enough to do so appreciably. As it stands I think governments should be focused on improving current infrastructure as that will have an appreciable effect for everyone. We’d really be better served by investing in more public transit.
No, at the end of the day a human was involved with creating that vehicle at some level and their is only so much an autonomous vehicle can be programmed/trained to handle. I believe people should be able to take full control of the vehicle when needed.
Not any time soon; things will get a little better when adoption becomes real but the bottleneck will always be the ineffective human driver. Even if your traffic is 99% super-smart networked AI, it will always be held back by the 1% offline human.
The same way the internal combustion engine affected horse-related jobs.
I hope they won’t do anything of the sort. When government does a thing, even with the best of intentions, it’s always a dumpster-fire of incomplete foresight and uninteded consequences. Besides, the tech seems to be adapting to the environment on its own. I think the biggest improvement would come from increased adoption and vehicles communicating with each other.
I do. Perfectly safe? Not really, but safer than trusting an average human driver.
The tech doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to do better than people. Which it already does. Source: sample of 1, with a Tesla, in the US. Get in car, press “start”, get out of car at the end, nothing else to do in >90% of trips.
Cars - regardless of fuel or autonomy level, will never be the future of urban transport because they just don’t scale at the same level that city growth does.
Using cars for urban transport is like using a dedicated server for every app and service you need to host. Will it work? Sure. But you’d need a full 24U rack just to host what could be done on a pint sized NUC. It’s all about
efficiency and optimisation, and there’s nothing we can do to bring cars to the same level of efficiency as good public transport
Totally agree. I think urban mobility has to be multi-modal.
In my view bikes (or e-bikes) and trams/street-cars present the best opportunities for urban mobility improvement here in the US.
NYC has a remarkable subway system, though Manhattan’s long narrow shape makes it quite easy to have a solid subway system.
Trams/streetcars are way faster to get on/off and dont present the safety concerns we see in subway stations. I think trams are much more effective when they have a dedicated lane and don’t need to compete with cars in traffic.
Anyway, I think self driving cars are not necessarily the future but are perhaps a component of the future.
Some of my thoughts from the context of an urban area around 800 years old.
Need to reduce car traffic in general, especially since most of the places I would like are on easy bike distance. Except that some of the routes are shit, and drivers worse than shit. But for some reason, someone wanted to build a freaking parking hall under the market square to the city center…
Increasing right of ways for busses. We have regional mass transit system, but the busses kinda get stuck in traffic, especially in the city center. For context, since almost all busses go through the city center slowing the progress down. For context, if I used my bike to drive on the other side of the city center, I will be there in about 20 min. On a bus, that is over 40 min.
Because of these two, I doubt self-driving will not change anything. Self driving cars do not have the scale to actually work as mass transit. But it might make sense in some cases.
I would personally like to see tram system of a couple of lines connecting the major “commie” suburbs through the city center. In practise though, there is no chance of getting that project done within budjet due to the regional economical setup, wherein companies do not make real offers and then beg for more money to get the project finished.
Well, that’s the real trouble, right? How do you know when it is not reliable? Humans are bound to get that decision wrong, making the whole technology unsafe.
What problem is this technology trying to address? Making the time lost on a required daily commute usable for other things?
How about we use existing, reliable technology to avoid the commute and its associated costs (time, fuel, energy, road construction, etc.) where possible? We had that just short 5 years ago and for some reason, that isn’t explained very well, employers force employees back on the road into overcrowded cities…
I don’t think the future of urban mobility involves any cars to begin with.
Cars are very inefficient and removing a driver doesn’t solve that.
I’ve been to several cities where the future has already started. Just amazing what you can do without any noticeable amount of cars. Faster, cleaner, cheaper and so convenient.
Well, I think most people like the idea of self-driving because it allows them to take their attention away from the road allowing to use driving time for other tasks.
How do all these poor people identify the 10 seconds in their 1 hour daily commute that they really need to pay attention to the road?
But it’s not about efficiency. Self-driving cars are about convenience. “oh, a machine can do some unliked task for me so that I can spend more time watching cat videos. Neat!”
We have trains and trams for that…for well over 100 years now. Faster and more convenient than a car does. Sure, I can grab my car and drive around 40min through traffic. Or I use the tram and watch cat videos for the next 15min. Or grab my bike and take the route through the park and replace cat videos with some workout.
My city has options and people tend to abandon their cars quickly as soon as they are presented with a choice by urban planners.
edit: And the development here is that more and more commute happens by bike and the administration is cutting down on the vast amount of 1960s-style car infrastructure to make room for increasing bike+pedestrian traffic.
Hard to agree to anything in politics, but almost all people here (and the tourists too) love it. This is the future.
No, any city should do their most to design cars out of their cities.
I don’t want to take away the plumbers van or make the farmer take the horse carriage to market, I just don’t want to get run over by some guy fumbling with their phone while driving.
what’s there to be “ready” for? Either the city is designed around cars or it isn’t. For example most european cities are not for historical reasons and the city centers are off-limits for car traffic
what does this mean? The entire point of AUTONOMOUS vehicles is to be… well… autonomous.
If they become a lesser and vastly more expensive form of public transit, limited to run on “rails” (real or virtual), why not invest the same money in public transit instead
At the moment the attention of the driver is monitored throughout the entire drive. You have to have your eyes looking at the road in front of you and your hands need to be “within reach” of the steering wheel to take over when it messes up. If those conditions are not met it will alert you to put in some user input (usually slightly shaking the steering wheel). I those conditions are continually not met then the vehicle will lock you out of using FSD for either that drive, or for ever if you get enough strikes.
FSD is still in beta even though they have dropped that from the name. There is however a roll out of unsupervised supposedly in Austin in two weeks though. That will not be public, or widely available for a very long time.
There is a large debate that the vehicle here wasn’t in FSD during (or near) the impact. There have been frame by frame studies and even the creator/uploader has said conflicting things. He’s got investments heavily into other tech (such as the lidar that was feature in the video) so at best this is a scewed advertisement and at worst an outright lie.
Well, I think most people like the idea of self-driving because it allows them to take their attention away from the road allowing to use driving time for other tasks.
