A System For Autonomous Cars
When people think of autonomous cars many things usually come to mind, such as employment and safety. People also often bring up different companies that are developing necessary software and how they might control things in the future. This is a cause for concern in my opinion. There will be a strong incentive for governments and corporations to collude, as they do, in order to end up with a system where all the cars are owned by corporations and all forms of transportation are rigidly controlled. The argument could very easily be made by governments that human drivers are much more dangerous and before you know it driving is no longer legal. Unfortunately people have a tendency to be persuaded into giving up freedom for what appears to be increased security. If big brother has its way and people allow it, nobody will be able to go anywhere without being authorized for that movement and being tracked every step of the way.
But it doesn't have to be that way, we can have a system where free and safe transportation is available for all. It's easy to imagine an autonomous car with perfected driving capabilities, always knowing what's around it and always driving safely, never making mistakes and so on. Now imagine it's equipped with solar panels. You might argue that it would still need to be charged on occasion. If so, the cars could go charge themselves somewhere automatically. If a car needs maintenance it can go to get it automatically too and if it is unable to get there it can be picked up by an automated pick up truck. The whole thing could run on open source blockchain technology so as to be secure and transparent.
Transportation should be a right, not a priviledge.
I have to wonder how beneficial cars with solar panels are in dense cities where the car is mostly in covered parking decks or underground parking.
That wouldn't be the case for automated cars. It's true that regular cars sit in parking lots, possibly indoors, for much of the time. But that's because the owner of the car hardly ever needs to use it and when the owner doesn't use it nobody else can use it. A driverless car would never sit around though, it would just go pick someone else up after dropping off the last person.
Ah, in a 3rd party system, where the service is constantly having cars in motion you mean? There has been talk of Tesla's having this as a future feature, where the owner is in a stationary location like at work or home,and the car is out shuttling other people around earning the owner revenue. I wonder how such a model could increase traffic since it would assume no cars are at rest in garages, parking decks, etc. It could be more efficient if it was all in sync though