Rohanarun

The day may come sooner than you expect though, because one of the "big players" is actively interested in the idea now..

Your concerns are all valid of course, but this is actually considered a better solution from the people working on the solutions too. It takes a lot to admit you are wrong, so imagine how much better this solution must be for them to do that.

I agree any real car hack will likely not end well. This solution also introduces the possibility of a new vector for state sponsored attacks, which should be concerning to some.

The utilitarian decision is still to upgrade everyone, because the people who would hack cars to kill would likely do it another way. This may become the new improved way to "cut brakes." A state mandated system could upgrade hacking charges to serious felonies, which deters most except state-sponsored and psychopaths. I have a feeling that real car hacks will be as rare as poison Halloween candy

Also in a situation where someone is hacked, having a dense recorded model of all the roads in a city would be very handy for investigation, since the hacker would likely have to be near the car.

That's very true, but in the alternative scenario, you would have citizens who never buy new cars driving in semi autonomous cities.

No matter how hard it may be to get past the political problems, this solution would guarantee more lives would be saved. Whether that's worth it requires weighing against the alternative: lives lost and more years for the lower bar to raise. There's an $800 Billion+ in savings available if cities implement, and they don't even have to be the ones to develop the technology. Politics also change quickly when there's money involved from the players who can implement such a system, like google or apple.

Also a point on obsolescence risk: are you confident enough to buy an autonomous car now? When better autonomous reconstruction systems come out, you would be obsolete unless you buy a new car. A city can upgrade daily.

That's a good point, thanks I'll add it to the post under the top arguments.

My answer would be that the current upgrade speed is to buy a new car, and how many people do you expect will do that in 15 years?

This alternative approach brings up the lower bar, but still allows people to buy special cars like Teslas, if you want. So you can get the independent car if it's important to you, but you would also get the benefit of every other car on the road being safer.

This solution is more geared towards optimizing in the numbers in car crashes

If a car starts moving independent of a city's models, it would easy to identify as a possible hack in real time. If a car gets hacked independently, there may not be much evidence of how it happened. The idea is a city based system can send help faster. A completely independent system can be hacked in multiple different ways to trick the controls, such as through the model, but a city based system would also have minimal interfaces in the actual car.

Would appreciate any feedback on how to improve the simulation for testing. For now turning off traffic lights makes the efficiency go up by 10 cars/minute. It would be interesting to test real city models, and different traffic algorithms