I don’t think a full on level 5 system is possible. There will be some environment I can which the car won’t be able to function (blizzard, hurricane, nuclear war, alien invasion). A good level 4 system is good enough. Of course there isn’t a clear line between level 3 and 4, and the difference between 2 and 3 is at…

It might be possible for various government to get together and sign some sort of “lets not do this” treaty, which they will mostly stick to (developing things in secret, for sure, but at least not stockpiling death robots)

Right, but if you they aren’t legal, there is still the dual use technology you have to worry about. If you can easily get robots with all the capabilities of the murdertron, except for the deadly weapon, someone is going to buy a totally-not-a-murder-tron and give it a rifle and tell it to go kill people.

I’m not sure which possibility scares me more. If a backdoor into military hardware falls into the wrong hands it would be very bad. But at least the military tries really hard to take precautions, so backdoors are going to be hard to find, and they may be secondary systems to put a stop to the death robots (but maybe…

Umm, that doesn’t sound entirely accurate. No matter electric or gas, power is still torque times rpm, so electric motors still make more power at high rpm than the do in low rpm, assuming constant torque (there are a few kinds of electric motors that make lower torque the faster they turn, thus turn out peak force…

On the other hand, if we do make it illegal, it’s not clear how much that would really slow things.

I think the most pressing danger is in simply making inexpensive, hard to control killing machines. Basically an autonomous drone capable of detecting and shooting people who aren’t wearing the proper pin, in addition to wondering around and plugging itself in to recharge. Nothing fancy, but capable enough that a…

That was my first question as well. Is that a makeup case?

They may well prefer to be driven in their own car.

Is it for better visibility?

The way I read it, the main question here isn’t the wide spread adoption of autonomous tech (I agree that if it’s possible it’s going to be very widely adopted) but that autonomous tech will end car ownership for most people.

Ride sharing (cars that everyone uses but no one owns) has an advantage in one scenario: if level 5 autonomous cars are possible, but will be very expensive. It’s easier to justify the cost of a 250k+ vehicle if it’s shared among many people.

Sometime I think they just want to wait half your day. There was a vehicle I was buying that I made all the arrangements ahead of time. Price was agreed upon, trade in was agreed upon, financing, etc. I sent in a deposit, told they I would be there on that weekend. They said the dealership doesnt officially open till…

That’s fine if you’re sure everyone else responds the same way. That RFQ is going out to at least a dozen different dealers, some of them will make an offer.

Last vehicle I bought, i tried at a local dealer, then got a quote from one 500 miles away. The one farther away was willing to give 2k more for a trade in, and 8k less on the price. $10k is plenty of reason to go traveling. Now, I did spend an extra $1500 on travel and made a mini vacation out of it.

I don’t haggle, probably for similar reasons. That said, there is no reason to pay more than you have to. Simply email 5-10 dealers asking for a quote, then choose the lowest one.

Why would hcci engine not have pumping losses?

Yep, except crossing them at 90 has you going right into traffic, which seems to be going a tad fast.

Even if we agree with the assumption that the rich and famous (ish) will not want to rub elbows with the riff raff, how many people really shop for cars in dealerships anymore?

How much separation does a brand really require? How far removed is Cadillac from Chevrolet in most peoples minds?