I believe from what I read is that some of these driverless car companies in the US are releasing their fleet, flooding the street 24/7. Some of them will take up parking places, cause traffic jam, or just stall in the middle of the road.
Maybe it’s different in the Europe, where there’s stricter regulation, since from the comments here, many who are okay with driverless car are mostly from European countries. Unless if you own stock in those companies, then there’s incentive caused bias.
Just like how drugs need to go on multiple clinical trials before going on the mass market, I believe that if you want driverless vehicles, a lot of testing is needed.
But this is not testing / gathering data phase, Cruise has 300 cars at night, 100 during the day in SF, while Waymo has around 250 cars. Again, this is not testing phase, there’s no driver to safeguard in case things go wrong, these are actual driverless taxi that charges people.
The main rationale of these companies is not to bring a safer environment with driverless cars, the main rationale is how to get rid of gig workers that causes problems to Uber or Lyft, problems such as demanding living wage, proper employment status, unions, etc.
If you want to look at a better approach, maybe look at how Singapore is doing it
- it’s operated by SMRT and SBS bus, which are regulated and owned by government
- it’s self driving bus
- “drivers will remain essential to the operation of autonomous vehicles even when these do take off, although their job scope will change”
So if you wanna support, maybe don’t support what Cruise is doing, but more of what Singapore is doing
- it’s still highly regulated
- it’s a bus, it’s a public transportation, so it still helps in tackling climate issues.
- it’s not being used to fire workers,
- there’s still failsafe, the drivers are standby, in case the bus goes haywire
