I actually strongly disagree with your skepticism on this. A long electric bus with a dedicated lane may be exactly what we need. I've been wondering for year

I actually strongly disagree with your skepticism on this. A long electric bus with a dedicated lane may be exactly what we need. I've been wondering for years why something like this wasn't in wide use. Forget the autonomous part of this. I see advantages over both trains and buses. Over trains: 1) the cost of a lane of road is significantly less than the cost of a mile of rail, especially if it is grade separated Over buses: 1) less operators are needed than an equivalent number of buses 2) more axles can mean less weight per axle which means less road wear than buses. I wonder how many axles they are using and how much weight there is per axle. Yes, there is no real new technology here. It doesn't have a nuclear engine and blow out happiness bubbles as it goes by. But, it is a configuration of existing technologies which provides a mass transit option that is needed in cities right now: the low-capital-cost train. That is what light rail was supposed to be. Configurations can matter. Look at the design of HMS Dreadnought. That wasn't really a new technology either, but it instantly made every other battleship afloat obsolete.