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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

...except if said family has kids of the age that they need car seats, which are a pain in the ass to install correctly; ripping them out and putting them back in twice a day is both ridiculous and unsafe. And you can't realistically even have shared cars with pre-installed car seats, because they need to be adjusted all the frigging time as the kid grows.

FWIW, neither my wife or I had ever owned a car, we managed just fine with public transport and car-sharing. But once the baby came along, we pretty much had to buy a car.

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Yes, you too will benefit from robotic cars! You may have to pay your service some premium for a toddler-safe vehicle, but only when you need to take the kid; and what you'll get is a way more expensive vehicle than you could otherwise afford, with a back seat completely designed around toddler safety. There won't be straps to adjust, because there will be no requirement that this car can be converted for the transport of adults, or bicycles, or anything else.

All of that aside from that the system will be safe enough that you can trust your toddler to order and ride in vehicles by themselves if necessary.

Have you ever seen a toddler outside a movie? All the automation in the world isn't sufficient to contain the hijinks of a determined two-year-old.

That said, I'm totally in favor of self-driving vehicles and wish they'd hurry up so I can get one. Containing that two-year-old is way easier when you don't have to concentrate on traffic at the same time!

My experience -- admittedly not parental, and certainly skewed towards highly functional families -- has been that young children tend to be about as responsible as they need to be to get what they want. Not to say that we're going to obsolete parents any time soon, but I do think we can make our world safe enough that we won't need to watch them as much.

Virtually all auto accidents are because of human error, and computers can handle any situation with lightning-fast (literally) reflexes.

If driver-less cars become the norm, the practical need for toddler car seats will cease to exist.

You could just request that the car have a child seat. If the rest of the auto-taxi system existed, easily adjusted seats wouldn't be a big blocker.

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