I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road.

We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.

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structural 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today.

Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?

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intrasight an hour ago | parent [-]

Because traffic volume.

Autonomous cars won't panic and cause pileups.

	▲	structural an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The way to prevent pileups is not to assume that everything will work correctly, including every system on every car. It's to assume that every single thing that could break, will break, and design enough resiliency in that you have to stack up as many failures as possible before things truly go off the rails. So to do this without killing people, you add the new systems with the same safety thresholds, then gather quite a few years of statistics, then, slowly let things become more efficient if that's both warranted by data and also warranted by simulation of events that you do not yet have data for. Skipping steps in this because you want to put more cars on the road immediately is foolish and dangerous.