Fully autonomous vehicles will never reach maximum reliability, speed, and efficiency either until we eliminate human drivers, pedestrians, stoplights, buildings, and pave the entire surface of the planet.
Fully autonomous vehicles will never reach maximum reliability, speed, and efficiency either until we eliminate human drivers, pedestrians, stoplights, buildings, and pave the entire surface of the planet.
And for maximum safety, we'll need physical barriers that prevent the vehicles from leaving their designated path. The easiest way to do this, in my opinion, would be to put a special type of wheel on the vehicle. The wheels would have a flange on the perimeter, and the road surface could have a groove that the flange fits into, thus preventing the vehicle from veering off outside its prescribed lane. This would actually provide such tight control on the vehicles' lateral movement, that it would become possible to connect several vehicles front to back, in a sort of autonomous convoy, which is pretty cool IMO!
Yeah. Also, please refrain from reaching maximum speed and efficiency of the transportation system alone.
That's not an important goal. The important goal is to optimize the life of the people that use the lines, not artificial measures taken from just looking at the machines running in them.
Wait, what if we put them on tracks and they had predetermined stations they stopped at?