There's always going to be a driver side or someone who has control of vehicle operation.
Ah, no. A fully autonomous level 5 vehicle could have absolutely no controls at all for any of the occupants. In fact, there may come a point when no one in the vehicle has to have a driver's license. Like getting into an electric automated Taxi. You tell it where you want it to go and it goes there. And, the only thing that the vehicle will do initially is verify that the individual requesting the ride has the authority to be requesting the ride. In other words, is either the owner of the vehicle or someone who has properly provided a way for the toll for usage of the vehicle to be paid.
It may even be that you could tell your vehicle that it has permission to provide a ride for a child with no adult accompanying them. Such as but not limited to taking a child to or from a school, or a school function, without an adult accompanimet.
Also, when Vehicles become fully autonomous it may very well be that there is provided means for watching television, movies, computer usage, or even sleeping while the vehicle goes about it's chore of transporting any occupants.
Fully autonomous, means fully autonomous. The vehicle provides all decisions and the individual being transported is not involved in driving the vehicle in any manner whatsoever. They are passenger. Nothing more than a passenger. Also, fully autonomous vehicles will be able to go to maintenance facilities such as a dealer, or an independent provider of maintenance without anyone being in the vehicle to and from the maintenance facility.
When all vehicles on public roads are fully autonomous and able to be fully autonomous regardless of all conditions that they may encounter, then traffic lights will be an antique thing of the past. Vehicles will negotiate intersections without stopping when there is no necessity to stop. In other words never waiting on a red light when there's nothing coming on the other roads that intersect the intersection. In fact, Vehicles will go through intersections timed so that they just miss other vehicles if that is what is required to get all the vehicles flowing through the intersection with minimum delay of each vehicle. Fully autonomous, means fully autonomous. And when Vehicles reach that level they will be able to do things that cannot be done today. But the biggest benefit, will be the drastic reduction in vehicle fatalities and injuries that we put up with nowadays.
Think about how often everyone who rides in a vehicle nowadays is endangered by other people who are out there driving under the influence, or distracted, or driving a vehicle that is mechanically unsafe, or basically just a bad driver. Every time you get in a vehicle nowadays and you go out on public roads you are subjected to the safety hazards that these individuals exposure you and yours to. That will be a thing of the past.
BTW, the reduction of insurance premiums from the extremely drastic reduction of fatalities and injuries and damage to the vehicles, will go a long way to supplement the cost of keeping vehicles on the road (or possibly in the air) in full autonomous usage.
Fully autonomous will be as big of a game changer as the difference between horses and Automobiles.
But we are only at level 2 now, and we have a long way to go before we get to level five.
People who do not understand that this is possible in the future, and may think that it is some kind of a pipe dream that is totally impossible, probably also do not have any understanding of how fast computers can execute commands nowadays. And because computers can execute so many commands in such a short amount of time it is just a matter of getting the software written to do this job and then inputting the proper sensing of what's going on to this software. What's really nice about all of this is that once the software is developed it can easily be distributed in extremely large distribution worldwide. Yes, it's millions of man hours of software writing, maybe even billions of man hours of software writing. But, work is being done to get all this accomplished. Eventually it will happen.
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By the way, we were only at level two now. So don't think that anything some salesperson says about their vehicle be it Musk or someone else of any car manufacturer tells you about their vehicles ability to be self-driving is really a full autonomous self-driving vehicle. It is not. We are at level two not level five. And people who try to use vehicles that are at level two for full autonomous driving are the ones who end up getting killed.
You'll know it's a full level 5 capable vehicle when it comes with no steering wheel no brake pedal no gas pedal and just a microphone to tell it where to go at the beginning of the trip before it ever starts moving, or to make a change in destination sometime during the trip, and a means of verifying that you have the authority to be requesting the ride.
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Full autonomous level 5 will be great when it is finally developed but we're not there yet.
