I think most Americans think this way cause they have nice home, cars, vacations etc, but the fact remains, most Americans if they had no income coming in for a month or two, they be homeless which snowballs into being poor and extremely hard to crawl out unless you have relatives to help you out AND you have the drive to do so. Most think it just takes one moving in right direction in life to get out of the ghettos and low income neighborhoods, but it is very hard to overcome gang pressures. How many times can someone keep getting up after trying to get out before they give up. And if you grew up all around you same crap everyday and don't see a change, you don't have many role models that can show it can be done. And tough for parents, both often working one and two jobs for their families to breakeven, when do you find time to go to school, then after done with school, can't find anyone to hire you. American is too much me me me, if they read how people lived during depression of 1930s, even if you had the drive, you had to compete with the masses for next to nothing. Ever go down to homeless shelter for a week to help out? Just few hours a day, you might see how others don't live. I wonder if Driverless cars will work in big cities as loss of signal will happen due to tall buildings?
Pull our troops from around the world and let the corporations keep the peace and sea lanes open, they don't want to pay taxes then let them foot the bill. People move their money from overseas to USA when the crap hits the fan in some troubled nation, factories would likely react the same way.
Gps for signal, they can run relays but you wouldn't need it all the time. All the info is still there. The vehicle can figure out how far it traveled and has to sensors to know where its at on the road. There is other cues a autonomous machine can use other than a signal. Given the last known point and plotting it out by mph and know road length, i don't think it would be a huge hurdle. Having the damn things not run people over is much much harder. Hell i still haven't bought a roomba because i don't quite trust em yet not suck up a shoe lace or some other dumb thing. I can't imagine the cars are so ready to get out and drive.
Most of the time nowadays location on phones for example is set by mobile towers and other wi-fi points, not by GPS.
Gps, mobile towers.. It all works on triangulation. I don't believe wi fi works the same as towers or gps. But hell maybe i don't understand it as much as others.
What are cities going to do for revenue when they can't hide in the bushes and ticket people? Self driving cars don't speed. They don't take no right turns on red.
I live in NYC. People here are nuts pedestrians. I'd worry about an angry asshole sitting in front of an auto car, because it won't know what to do. I assume the passenger would have to manually solve that situation. Using GPS here is totally fine for driving. If all cars were relayed I'd imagine it's be even better; imagine no need for traffic lights because all cars know where the other is and are working in tandem... I am not thinking about driverless taxis yet and taxi unions. Let's see what happens to long distance trucking and trucking unions first.
Police eating donughts hiding in the bushes and talking on their cell phones setting up speed traps, or raising taxes on the people that actually use the schools, the roads, the water, the street cleaning, etc. Hmmm, seems like capitalism to me. Pay to play.