Somehow I expect that the sanitation issue you bring up with buses and sneezing will only be worse with one or two occupants in a self-driving car that's hired for a single trip. Between vandalism, bodily fluids, and sexual escapades, I expect that a self-driving car lacking an attendant (in the way a cab driver is present in the cab) will mean worse conditions for cars than taxis now have, and they aren't even known for being the most hygienic of experiences to begin with.

People behave badly when they think they can get away with it. I expect that this will be a problem with a self-driving car unless you want to introduce recording devices to monitor the passengers the whole time, then you introduce another avenue for privacy invasion.

Your "simple" plan cuts transportation by a huge margin, say hello to large price increases for anything transported further than a trivial distance. The food you eat is not just transported, but planted, and harvested using the energy whose price you massively increased. Increase food prices even more. Your plan for coal breaks the power grid. Brownouts, blackouts and mandatory rationing will be necessary. Oh and the impact on food refrigeration will help increase food costs even more again.

Your "simple" solution would cause massive chaos, social unrest, riots and death. I suppose if thats your simple goal, then you're fine.

It's got a limited slip with a 3.08 gear ratio. The car has less than 25,000 miles on it and I did the rear diff fluid change myself at about 7,500. The car will lay two stripes for quite a distance if I feel like wasting tires that way.

It also has four-wheel-disc. That was one upgrade that the Impala got that even the police-package Caprices didn't.

And I have been to real drag races. The cars barely take-off because they drive into the water-box and burn the debris off their tires before backing to the starting line and taking off.

It might be even easier, contract with a service-station chain to have the cars refuelled between clients.

This is assuming that they are gasoline or other fossil-fuel powered. If they manage to improve battery technology by the time this becomes practical then they might return nightly for a battery exchange.

I hate hipsters, assholes, and golddiggers. And I hate people that try to get ahead by stepping on other people's heads.
Watching the fight between Uber and Lyft, it feels like the appropriate way to do a little bit of social good is simply calling Yellow Cab.

The reason is simple. They are poor people in the third world taking money from the rich people! Why should they care? They are sticking it to the man.
Just remember that next time you feel no sorrow sticking it to the man. You are the man to someone else.

Not necessarily. Rich people also have the disposable income to afford more than one car. Hell, I as a fairly poor person for awhile had more than one operational car, and as someone with decent means at this point in my life has four functional vehicles, one mid-restoration, and one restored vintage muscle car belonging to another family member stored in the garage.

A rich person would probably love to have a self-driving car to act as their sedan service, especially if the law allowed for occupant-less cars to drive themselves from the passenger pickup/dropoff point to a storage lot while waiting to be used again. A rich person might commute to work that way, but drive a small sports car on the weekends or during the evening, for fun. Even a person of modest means with a self-driving car and another car still might do the same thing.

There was an early fuel injection system in about 1958 or so on some Mopars, manufactured by Bendix and adapted from an aircraft fuel injection design. It delivered more power and more efficient fuel delivery than carburetors ever could. Unfortunately too late, they realized that it was poorly shielded against EMI, and if an old prewar car with a Magneto pulled up next to it, the new fancy fuel-injected car would stumble and shut off.

Cars are electrically incredibly dirty. Alternators generate electricity at continuously varying voltages and Hertz, and inexpensive voltage regulators are there to attempt to turn that garbage AC power into something usable in DC, which itself fluctuates in voltage up and down, sometimes bottoming out as low as 8V, and sometimes as high as 16V on a nominally 12V system. There are ignition coils storing up and discharging extremely high voltage to fire the spark plugs tens of thousands of times a minute through inexpensive and electrically-leaky spark plug wires, and there are magnetic systems like the air conditioning compressor clutch as well as weaker ones like the various position/timing sensors for the cam, crank, transmission output shaft or differential, etc.

I can totally see how a particular bit on an automotive computer could be flipped.

Because the cost to purchase a feature is not necessarily reflective of the cost to implement that feature. The difference between the two is called profit. When the automakers introduce a new feature they charge a premium for it, based on the amount of money they feel that they can make given the price and demand. When demand falls, they lower the price, and continue doing so until it eventually becomes either ubiquitous or it's demonstrated that there's no demand for it anymore.

Cadillac had systems in the 1950s that could detect rain and turn on the windshield wipers, and could detect oncoming headlights and dim the brights down to normal headlights. Some cars today have automatic wipers, but I can't think of a single car today that has auto-dimming headlights.

Of course it also prevent a lot of starvation.

I don't think that it does what you think it dies [sic].

Your statement is far more accurate than you intended

I had an idea for a solution years ago. Design new Bott's Dots that integrate some kind of RFID and other sensory-detectable equipment to designate pathways for cars to travel on, and start building roads with these new dots that get designated as autonomous-capable thoroughfares. Integrate a variant of these Bott's Dots into road construction barriers too, so that they can override the ones on the ground when an alternate path is needed, and give the police some of these to use when they have to detour around accidents. Obviously also integrate the standard hazard sensors and other environment detection, but use this method to direct the through lanes.

Or, embed some kind of wire in the road similar to how they embed the traffic light sensor in the road, and use the RFID thing as an override for that when needed.

Even in a muscle car, the brakes are more powerful than the engine.

That's complete and utter bullshit. I drive a '95 Impala. I can hold the brakes at a stop and floor the throttle, and cut the back tires loose. That car is completely bone-stock with factory-sized extra wide tires to give it as much traction as possible and I have enough power to overcome the hydraulic brakes at a dead stop. Hydraulic brakes don't have a chance if the car is actively under wide open throttle at speed, the brakes will heat up and effectively lose friction, causing them to fail.

By contrast, the e-brake on a car is not hydraulic, it's a physical steel cable that pulls on the rear brake's shoes to pull them into physical contact with the drums, or in the case of rear-disc cars, to have special auxiliary shoes make contact with the central hub of the rear rotor. Those brakes are designed to hold the vehicle still when parked on a slope so that if the parking pawl doesn't seat properly in the output shaft of the transmission, the car doesn't immediately roll down the hill.

As those e-brake cables are generally made of mild steel, they're prone to rust and fail, and it's very common to have to replace them in rustbelt climates. I've even seen them fail in desert, dry climates after enough years.

Stop spreading this crap that's completely false. Brakes on cars only really work right when there are no other forces acting at the same time. Throttle on? Brake will be ineffective. Going downhill at a high rate of speed? Brake will be less effective. Being pushed? Brake will be ineffective.

Self-driving cars will be luxury items to start with. Not only won't they be in the price range of your financially-strapped new-driver, they won't even be in the price range of most consumers. New drivers will end up with used cars. I expect that it'll be 30+ years before self-driving cars are even close to half of cars on the road, if not longer, as a lot of people won't give up the ability to self-drive, won't want to replace a self-driving car with an autonomus-only car, or can't afford the extra cost of such a car.

No, it wasn't, at least in all cases. There were definite computer control problems that led to the computer getting stuck in a mode where it had the throttle applied, and ignored the brake, shut-off, and gear-selector inputs because since logically the throttle was applied, those other inputs must be erroneous.