Self-driving cars will never be popular as you can't speed in them.
Given how many people treat speed limits as suggestions, at best, having your vehicle obey the limit would turn some people off of them.
People ride the bus and you can't speed there either.
Guess you’ve never been to South America, Need for Speed Underground2 soundtrack starts playing on busses betweeen 22:00 and 5:00, optional bonus: your driver is bald and wearing a tanktop-
Ah shit you wouldn't know how buses run in my locality.....
I don't know anyone who would claim the bus is "popular".
I think they're making the point that in lots of places where public transit is good, people use it just because they then don't have to deal with traffic and driving themselves.
The bus is popular. Here in the Netherlands they are used loads.
Truly self driving cars would allow you to participate in other activities safely while the car moves you. You could read a book, play a game, apply your makeup, etc. Given that trade-off, I think most people would be willing to sacrifice the extra 2.5 minutes a trip.
2.5 minute estimate derived from the difference of travel time between half the average US daily travel of 42 miles at a speed of 60mph and the same distance traveled at 68mph.
Most people would accept the trade-off of being in the car 5 minutes longer per day if it meant they got 42 minutes of leisure instead of 37 minutes of weaving through traffic.
Also with a critical mass adoption of self-driving cars the speed limit could be increased.
You mispelled 42 minutes of doomscrolling. ;-)
Also with a critical mass adoption of self-driving cars the speed limit could be increased.
Only if the bicycle paths are separated from the road by a wall.
That's all anyone's ever wanted anyway!
My city's solution to that is just to not have bike paths and tell people to "share the road" on 45 MPH streets.
Does it bother you if the driver is driving slowly when you're a passenger though? I don't think most people will care that much if thier self driving car follows the speed limit.
This is true, but I think the bigger deal is that some people actually like driving (maybe not the trafficky daily commute). Some speeders fit this category, but also others who just like being precise on the curves, being in the flow of an uncrowded road, and even expressing their neighborliness to others.
So far, self driving cars drive very clumsily even when they are safe. More scope for embarrassment and frustration than anything else if you identify with the behavior of your car. "Chill mode" for example, chooses the right of a four lane road until the last minute instead of making lane changes when space allows. Awful.
But even if the cars get better at it, some people will miss driving.
I like driving, specifically when there's no one else on the road around me so I can just do my thing and cruise along.
I just drove across a couple states yesterday, in fact. I spent about half the time going about 90 mph, cause I had an 8 1/2 hour drive ahead of me.
I love to use trains to get around. I don't need to do the work of driving, which puts every aspect of safety, navigation, and stress on me the whole trip. On the train I can sleep, do computer work, eat in a relaxed space, or talk with my kids without having to yell in each other's ears to be heard.
Driving is a huge energy, stress, and time sink. It's a plague upon our society. I'd rather have a train style space, but at least a self driving car would give a few of the benefits of the train. It's a over technical inefficient and halfway there option compared to real transit, but it's better than making me do it all myself.
I don't usually speed much. It barely saves much time at the cost.of safety and mental stress. I'm also often tusing trains that usually go much faster than a car anyway, and sometimes up to 200+ mph. A self driving car (or any reasonable car) can't even begin to touch real transit.
I don't think the people who want to speed are the kind of people I want driving anyway.
Admitting you want to bypass the rules should be a red flag and imo warrant an immediate cancellation of your permit. You're driving a thousand kilos of metal at bone shattering speeds, if you can't be trusted to be responsible, don't drive. (And it's a general you, not you OP)
If self-driving cars got to the point where they were significantly safer than human drivers (a big if), I could see the creation of dedicated self-driving lanes with higher speed limits.
The biggest problem with automation is, it can't deal with things that aren't expected or detected.
The current roadscape is too chaotic to be able to code in all the edge cases, as well as deal with the sensor issues.
I think the only way self driving vehicles will be able to operate (until the roadscape changes/evolves) is to have dedicated roads(probably toll roads initially), where only compatible vehicles will be allowed to utilize, and only when in autonomous mode.
There the environment can be controlled much tighter, and we can get through teething problems with the inter vehicle/roadscape communications.
These roads will expand as society adopts them, and there will be fewer manually driven roads.
Eventually all cars can communicate with all others, as well as a centralized road traffic controller. And almost all roads will be autonomous required.
Then the car crash scene in irobot can happen.
That sounds like dedicated bus lanes, except you don’t need the higher speed limits since avoiding traffic takes care of the need to speed.
Now we just wait until some tech bro picks up the idea and resells it with AI in the name at 10x the cost to tax payers.
That would just end with normal cars getting there to take advantage of the hight speed limit, which is a great way to cause an accident.
If every car was self driving, traffic wouldn't slow down and you'd get places quicker at much safer speeds.
I'm not one to advocate for cars of any kind, but I sure don't care about the particular speed when I'm lost in the sauce listening to music or reading on the train
I'm a speeder, but only because I want to be driving as little as possible. Driving is the bullshit that occurs in between the other things I need to do.
Ride share is very popular and it offers a similar service to what most people expect from self driving cars.
I think that the majority of people want a vehicle for transportation and those who want a car for recreation are a minority.
Bold of you to assume hackers don’t exist
If there was 100% adoption of self-driving vehicles with a inter-vehicle communication network, there is no reason why the left lane couldn't go 100+ mph. There still would be lower speeds outside of the highway, but they could be substantially higher than today on most major roads.
Human drivers are why speed limits exist. People follow too close, people are impatient, people are aggressive, people are risky, people don't know what the vehicles in front of them are going to do, people don't use turn signals, people hit the brakes and cut across multiple lanes of traffic because they weren't paying attention or missed their exit, etc.
Networked autonomous cars can communicate and collaborate, allowing for faster and safer travel. The left lane could have no speed limit because every car using it, leaving it, or entering it are all in agreement on what needs to be done and what to do and when to do it. Cars on major roads would slow down so another car can turn without causing the cars behind it to stop. Oncoming cars could slow to allow for an opening that a turning car can use instead of waiting for an opening in irregular traffic, or taking a risky turn that causes an accident.
Getting to that system will require laws against manual driving and mandating that all new vehicles have full autonomous driving. I hope I am dead before that happens because that future sounds awful to me.
The major roads are already nigh impossible to walk across. Finding a way to raise the speed just makes it harder to be a pedestrian in yet more places.
I, too, love the idea of networked autonomous swarm agents behaving in an even more efficient setup. The problem is that if the only focus is on moving cars faster at the cost of people's comfort, access, energy, and walkable anything we lose out on reasons to ever be outside of the car at all.
More cars and faster cars in our cities makes the city worse, even if they're self driving.
safety.
system components fail, debris winds up on a path, etc.
100 mph crash is just way less survivable. stopping distance is a function of speed. speed limits are also for human passengers.
I'll echo that there are safety issues. Motorcyclists (I ride my much more fuel-efficient bike when I don't have something too big where I need my car), bicycles (which I also ride for leisure and errands close by), and pedestrians (same here) aren't going to work very well in that. You're not going to mandate that every person carry some kind of transponder and that it must always work. Where I live, many students are walking and cycling. I also think tractors, dump trunks, and other special equipment will still have human drivers for at least part of the journey for the foreseeable future.
Also, smacking into an animal at 160kph is terribly dangerous and potentially damaging. A blowout at that speed also has much scarier implications for control. A lot of hazards would need to have issues solved here as well.