this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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Fuck Cars

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Or is the thread one of the naiive ones trying to argue about how we can completely eliminate cars?

You say that as if those threads are actually a common thing, and not just a strawman accusation from the fevered dreams of car-brains.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Go into a thread on autonomous cars and all you'll hear is about how they're useless and we don't need them because we'll just eliminate all cars before they're ready.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have literally never seen that argument made.

Usually, what I see in those threads are a whole bunch of people arguing that autonomous cars would be some kind of silver-bullet panacea for traffic.

Frankly, what you wrote sounds like a strawman misinterpretation of an argument I myself make: I argue that autonomous cars are not a solution, but not "because we’ll just eliminate all cars before they’re ready." They're not a solution simply because they're still cars, and therefore take up the same grossly excessive amount of space as non-autonomous cars do.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They’re not a solution simply because they’re still cars, and therefore take up the same grossly excessive amount of space as non-autonomous cars do.

Yeah, the only things autonomous cars might reduce are:

  1. Parking, but only if we forego our current private ownership model and everyone starts doing self-driving robo-taxis everywhere (unlikely)
  2. Road fatalities, but only if the self-driving tech proves statistically better than human drivers in a wide range of conditions (jury is still out)

It's the same fundamental problem that electric cars have: geometry. Cars -- even if electric and self-driving -- are simply grossly inefficient at moving people for the amount of land they require:

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

Except that the jury is not "still out" on number two, it is simply a matter of time, engineering, and training before they are statistically safer than humans.

Waymo's cars are already safer than humans in their limited conditions.

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