It may not scale to rural areas though. There are some roads were you don't need to look at the road in front of your: it is there and nothing else is. Instead you need to watch the ditches in a wide area around because that is where wildlife will jump out of in front of you.
Having driven many rural roads, that is something I would be much more comfortable with an automatic system on: staring around for deer at night is the classic attention task where humans tend to fail.
What I wouldn't be as comfortable with is the "random sheet of ice" or "oh look, rocks" or "suddenly washboard dirt road".
Most drunk driving accidents/deaths happen in rural areas because there is really no other alternative for transportation. Because of low population density and long distances taxis are basically impossible to find. Self driving cars could definitely fill a niche there should they ever become cost effective.
If the price is right, maybe. I live in a semi-rural area (about a house per acre, but unevenly distributed) and we have one Uber driver and a handful of taxi companies. Competition is tough though, my PHEV costs very little to operate and there's always parking and the bus system does on demand rides for $2 during weekdays between the morning and evening peaks.
I can't speak for the US, but in Europe (experiences from Sweden, Norway, Russia) rural areas usually have a handful of taxi drivers and you "use their services" by calling their numbers which you can get from locals.
In Finland we had a law that required the taxi monopoly to provide services even in rural areas, so disabled and elderly people could get transportation to services they need. Worked well in my town of 7 000 people except sometimes on weeknights the only driver could be in the next city 50km away.
(Had, as in they changed the law few years back. Not sure how it's now)
Robotaxi(s) could be quite good solution to the problem - the drivers were often pissed if you called them for a single ride when they were home or far away.
So long as it is only urban areas it is a band-aid for the lack of good transit options.
Not that you are wrong, just that you should be wrong because if cities actually had useful transit rural areas would be a much larger share of demand despite not having many people.
Very true, but retrofitting good transit into a city that didn't plan for it is extremely expensive and disruptive. I see these kinds of services being a great complement to public transit in cities that have struggled to make them attractive.
For example, I am way more likely to take Cal Train into SF if I can use a point-to-point service like Uber/Lyft/Waymo to get me the rest of the way there. Without that missing link, I'm much more likely to just give up and drive instead.
I’ll grant you that the muni busses are really terrible but they should get you (almost) from point to point. The muni system covers all the city of San Francisco (even Treasure Island) and run frequently.
The only problem is that they are painfully slow. If muni had more dedicated bus lanes (like, a lot more) it might very well be the best bus network in the world.
The best time to do good transit was 20 years ago, the second best is today. SF needs to quit making excuses and make transit good. What they have is not good even if it better than everyone else in the US.
The superiority of a blended computer vision system for this task, over a human performance, is almost impossible to overstate. The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.
>The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.
Oh it will. Animals have evolved amazing camouflage. Computer Vision will easily miss a deer hidden in a dark treeline. And radar/lidar even more so because the forest is going to have a pretty irregular geometry.
Even identifying a bicycle in a regular city street is something we have not convincingly solved yet. Animals on the side of a forest road is pretty far away.
It isn't possible to not overlook deer because they are often doing things such that you cannot spot them. Unless you mean they won't fail to see a deer 2 meters in front of the car - but it is too late to do anything about it then.
