Yeah, self-driving cards aren’t ready for prime time, yet. And I’m not holding my breath. But I am hoping that when I am too old to drive I can get one.
I’m skeptical about this. Can your friend pass the vision test? If not, I don’t want your friend at the controls in a parking situation.
Maybe, but the car would have to be able to navigate off-road just to get off the highway to safely come to a stop. There was no driveway at this particular home.
What attendant? The host of the party?
Again, the car’s gotta be capable of off-road navigation or it ain’t moving from where it was parked.
Well sure, I’m already banned from driving in the carpool lane if I’m by myself. That’s not what I said at all; you completely moved the goalposts.
Also, people will cheat if it’s just a few lanes here & there.
I assume so? It’s certainly common for elderly people to drive a small number of well-known local routes after they stop “general” driving. You need to be able to read signs to drive a new route. You can get along with seeing people and dogs and cars on routes you know.
The vast majority of places tweens need to go are easy to drive to. If there’s no driveway, can the car not just pull over to the side of the road?
Every time I’ve had to park on a lawn between markers, there’s been someone waving cars to approximately the right place. Some combination of beacons and attendants are going to solve this one. (And I’m guessing you’ll be able to rent beacons like you rent folding chairs.)
By “off road” you now mean “from an established parking lot”? Yes, I expect you and I will see that functionality.
Poor people aren’t buying 5 year old Teslas today. They’re buying 15 year old Ford Fusions and driving them for 10-15 years.
As I mentioned, in my circle of close friends I can think of a 40 year-old vehicle just off the top of my head, and that person is middle class.
My first husband owned a 31 year-old car and we were middle class at the time.
My aunt drives a POS car that she’s had since the 90s and it was old then. So it’s probably pushing 40. Zillow values their house at just under $3 million, so they’re definitely not poor… just excessively cheap with their cars. They are admittedly outliers in terms of the ratio of home value to car value, and no politician would shed tears over forcing them to buy a newer vehicle.
But my point is that I think you grossly underestimate how many age 30+ vehicles are on the road.
Not unless you want to hit the fence.
That might work. There were no “attendants” at this party.
So, how do you, a human, drop off a tween at this house? Drive onto their lawn, through the fence?
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No, I meant getting from the streamer-designated parking area to the road.
No, I’d drive through the break in the fence next to the mailbox where there’s some bare patches in the grass that are vaguely reminiscent of tire tracks.
You went straight from highway to off-road with no in-between.
So, an unpaved driveway?
I guess. Can self-driving vehicles handle that?
Today? I have no idea. It doesn’t strike me as the situation that’s going to break self-driving autos, but it’s also not so common a situation that it will prevent their taking off, even if it does.
I am NOT predicting that every manual drive car will be off the road in 20 years. I am predicting that there will be markets where a significant number of self-driving vehicles will be deployed.
Like… if you don’t have a garage with power, you may not find an electric car useful right now. But a lot of people are buying electric cars, even so.
Sure, that’s probably true. But I think you’ve got to solve unpacked driveways before a significant quantity of private owners are going to replace their vehicle with a self-driving one that can’t handle semi-common situations.
Certainly an intermediate step where a human driver is able to take over will be needed for quite a while before the no steering wheel / no brake / can be operated by the blind and drunk becomes reality.
I’m beginning to think your world is one that would be especially challenging for AVs 
I’m beginning to think that I’m the only person on the planet who thinks about ways that AVs might get tripped up.
I thought my lines on the parkway was a good example, but I think they could survive on a pretty healthy market share without ever dealing with unpaved, unmarked driveways.