I believe the biggest hurdle is that the bar has been set too low for what constitutes an acceptable standard of driving/casualty rate. There's so much that can be done to improve the situation but few answers are politically palatable (except for Netherlands, Sweden, and a few other countries around there, I believe). Car owners also seem to like driving, despite being stuck in traffic Mon-Sat.
I also think people will soon realise the limitations of trying to implement too much of this kind of tech as an answer to solving political and social problems. I'm not saying that the tech will never be good enough, but right now it's hard to see when that future will arrive in time before other pressing matters take hold.
However, what I do like about the self-driving car "movement" is that it's forcing more people to ask questions about what is acceptable when it comes to trauma rates. But for the time being, I see a lot of risk compensation ahead and fiddling around the edges.
More can be done a lot faster for less money if we instead were to focus all our efforts on reducing the population's overall dependency on private vehicle use and ownership. But in many parts, there's just too much money tied up in motordom with powerful parties are at play - the same parties who decide where to place big infrastructure spends and tax concessions. After all, always making new cars is one way to drive the economy - but at what externalised costs?
I also think people will soon realise the limitations of trying to implement too much of this kind of tech as an answer to solving political and social problems. I'm not saying that the tech will never be good enough, but right now it's hard to see when that future will arrive in time before other pressing matters take hold.
However, what I do like about the self-driving car "movement" is that it's forcing more people to ask questions about what is acceptable when it comes to trauma rates. But for the time being, I see a lot of risk compensation ahead and fiddling around the edges.
More can be done a lot faster for less money if we instead were to focus all our efforts on reducing the population's overall dependency on private vehicle use and ownership. But in many parts, there's just too much money tied up in motordom with powerful parties are at play - the same parties who decide where to place big infrastructure spends and tax concessions. After all, always making new cars is one way to drive the economy - but at what externalised costs?