> The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple

> The way to solve self-driving cars in a few years is to start building roads and infrastructure for such automation. Maybe even have a human driving multiple cars, computer assisted, simultaneously from a remote office. Even if the system took one driver-hour per vehicle-hour, with every vehicle controlled by one human driver at all times and each human driver controlling only one vehicle at a time, there would be significant benefits in terms of cost and availability from having all the taxi drivers working from a single ops centre, instantly assignable to any vehicle anywhere on demand. Any driver-hour-per-vehicle-hour reductions would be gravy on top of that. (However the system would certainly need some level of autonomous driving to at least halt the vehicle safely in the event of a communications failure or the like.) (It's probably a coincidence that Musk happens to be building something which might be extremely valuable as a component of such a remote-driving system https://www.starlink.com/ https://www.starlink.com/ , but perhaps it is not. 35mm of latency in each direction https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/spacexs-satellite-broadband-nears-fcc-approval-and-first-test-launch/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space... is probably not a showstopper in this application http://www.brake.org.uk/component/tags/tag/thinking-time http://www.brake.org.uk/component/tags/tag/thinking-time , especially if it can be compensated for by a professional and tightly-monitored driver pool, reduced speed limits and/or failsafe locally-controlled AI braking. The need to rely on autonomous driving and/or a supplementary ground-based network in tunnels and under bridges would likely be a bigger drawback.)