“It's a truck full of traffic lights”
I am fairly confident that the autonomous car business model is pretty dead.  Electric cars - that's great ! But self driving is waaaay harder.  And self driving has a inbuilt expectation of nearly perfect.  It's not that if we swapped to self driving cars today we would halve car deaths (which would be something like 500k people pa - which would be a huge very important thing) but it would not be perceived as robots save 500k people a year, it would be instead "robots kill the other 500k per year"<p>Liability, insurance, legal minefields and plain old marketing would never allow cars ,that perform as well as the best performing cars do today, to be on the roads in "every day" conditions.<p>My conjecture is we end up building AV only roads. initially one lane of a highway, then ring roads round cities and major warehousing hubs, then across urban areas.  Walled off in some way they simply become <i>railways with benefits</i>.<p>At that point every business model ever written with Self Driving in the title goes in the bin.<p>I am not saying the tech is useless - frankly it's fucking awesome that this is happening in my lifetime.  But fucking awesome tech and workable business model aren't always the same thing.<p>Not sure where I am going with the rant but I sure hope we get more out of the billions spent here than Teflon.