I am an old mining guy. Back in the late 1800's, after dynamite tamed nitroglycerine and made deep hard rock tunneling doable, the age of the deep mine emerged.

I am an old mining guy. Back in the late 1800's, after dynamite tamed nitroglycerine and made deep hard rock tunneling doable, the age of the deep mine emerged. You may have seen pix of the head frame - a triangular structure ~~ 100 feet high that was built about 1 or 2 deep shafts. At the high point were cable sheaves on large wheels(cable can not be bent like rope = it has a minimum radius = large wheels). These shafts were often 1000-2000 feet deep. Due to the weakness of steel cables of the era the sheaves often held 8 or more parallel cables. This was mandated by the maximum free hanging length - at which it broke by it's own weight = to carry large loads = parallel load sharing needed. (this is also why we do not yet have the theoretically possible 'sky-hooks' to synchronous orbits so popular in science fiction. Often these shafts would carry 20 tonnes or more. This was before safety brakes(self acting) and if the cable broke = 20 tonnes went down fast. These were usually dual shafts, 1 car went down as one went up in counterpoise. They had 2000-5000 HP geared motors and the loads were unbalanced - usually workers went down in an inline car above the empty load skip and the up coming skip with load often carried no people, as they worked 8 hour shifts. I read about one of these accidents here:- https://www.sudburyminingsolutions.com/news/looking-back-to-the-tragedy-that-led-to-the-creation-of-sudburys-rope-testing-lab-2081079 https://www.sudburyminingsolutions.com/news/looking-back-to-... Since then they have implemented fail-safe locks. The old spring 'dogs' failed as the dogs became fiber/rock choked. Now to cars. We have huge numbers of road deaths - all involving a few people, but collectively far more than mine accidents = a few a year in USA/Canada. So these distributed tragedies do not engender the response that the few mine accidents do? We know brakes, crumple zones, seat belts, air bags etc all work well to mitigate deaths - but not prevent it. Can we ever reach a fail-safe car that refuses to allow itself to be driven in a way that kills a person? We have heard of the Tesla/GM/Mercedes approaches to this - and we have seen the fails. I tend to think we can only reach this with a self driven car/truck that drives on roads that allow only self driven cars/trucks to drive on them. Leave the smaller roads to human drivers, add speed radar, red light/stop sign detectors - all with car smarts that will not speed, will not run a red light and will not allow unlicensed drivers at all access? It will turn the current system on it's head - but it will work. Will people accept it? If all these cars are a centrally controlled and locally dispatched resource that supplements public transit I think it will work - might take 100 years of electric car evolution, but it will come.