[...] some experts believe as much as 95% of passenger miles could be electric, autonomous by 2030, thanks to some basic economics. Because electric vehicles cost a whole lot less to drive and maintain—but more to buy—and because autonomous vehicles greatly reduce the cost of commercial driving, a combination of the two technologies will make autonomous Transportation as a Service exponentially more cost competitive than either owning a car, or hiring a car and driver. It's also exponentially more profitable for car companies, who have long feared the loss of maintenance and service profits associated with a transition to electric cars.
This question will come up more frequently as self-driving technology advances. Will perfection of that technology make a difference, though, in the face of social behaviors that have been deeply ingrained over the past century?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 26 2017, @11:48AM (1 child)
The fact that phone home may be legitimately impossible under some circumstances?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 26 2017, @01:51PM
And you think the car is unable to distinguish between being unable to phone home occasionally, and being unable to phone home perpetually (while the GPS indicates that you passed about ten dozen different cell towers last week which are extremely unlikely to have all been switched off)? Not to mention that sooner or later your car will have to go for obligatory maintenance (don't count on being able to do the maintenance yourself!), and then the non-operational connectivity will surely be detected and "fixed".
Not to mention that you'll have to alter something on the car to disable the phone-home functionality. Probably you will open something that you are not supposed to open, and unauthorized opening will disable the car "for safety reasons" until it is reset using a protocol requiring signatures with a valid key from a certified repair shop.