> Self-driving cars propose to reduce this risk of death and injury by taking away the autonomy we traded it for in the first place. A car that can drive itsel

> Self-driving cars propose to reduce this risk of death and injury by taking away the autonomy we traded it for in the first place. A car that can drive itself does not remove the autonomy having a car gives you. The key part of the autonomy is going where you want, when you want. Not that you get to push the pedals and turn the wheel. > We already have dumb machines that can do that: trains, trams, all sorts of vehicles-on-rails. Which travel only from and to certain places, at certain times. It's why what would be a three hour drive is likely to take me closer to five hours tomorrow, for example. For another example: the train station near my friends house stops running trains at 7pm, the roads are open all night. > We could replace them with, I don't know, some kind of overground system of personal pods on rails, or something like that. Building an entirely new, country wide, overhead rail system that goes to or extremely close to every house? That sounds incredibly expensive. > Why do we need self-driving cars, then? They're an incremental improvement which requires no new major infrastructure.