Parking could be deliberately placed far away: Cars could drop you at the front doors, then drive off and park themselves, returning to pick you up when you are done.
This could revitalize downtown shopping districts, for example.
It may not be a hardship for able people to walk to their car in today’s malls, but perhaps in the future your car could be parked a few kilometers away.
That could be a big win for liveability: Imagine malls that didn’t need to be surrounded by acres and acres of asphalt. Shuttles could carry people driving “legacy” vehicles between the parking and the mall, but those with autonomous vehicles wouldn’t need to wait for and share a shuttle.
Somehow having a lot of traffic created by empty cars is not a win in my liveability book. Unless you're sharing the car and it's picked up by someone 5 minutes away as soon as you get out you earn very little besides some driver convenience. Instead of acting like taxis that you drive yourself, they act like limos and everyone gets to feel like they have a chauffeur to get dropped off exactly at the spot.
Downtown shopping districts already solved this problem...by putting parking lots in the back or shared multi-level parking garages off to the side.
Self driving cars aren't magically going to give them money to rebuild if they haven't already.
> This could revitalize downtown shopping districts, for example.
Or we could have that today by limiting car access to downtown shopping districts, having large parking lots outside of town and investing in public transit. This is being enacted and it's working in many middle-sized European cities.
However I can see it will be beneficial to people with disabilities and the like. It's not all about laziness.
It is also a (small) step towards the fully self driving features they aim for.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/536961-the-reasonable-man-a...
It’s this constant battle between those who can’t imagine and the unreasonable man.
This isn't necessarily just a "nice to have" to have your car come to you in the parking lot. This is also potentially to have a semi-truck get itself out of the parking lot one day, or your taxi to show up from a remote stand.
"Does 'radio' ring a bell? 'Tape recorders' ring a bell?"
This is exactly why having open source mapping information is so useful - if you see an issue you can go in and correct it rather than hoping an anonymous corporation will do it for you.
[1] Due to its open collaborative nature, there is an obvious risk for bad or even malicious edits submitted to OSM. On the other side, "professional" and closed mapping services can have errors too, especially they run the risk of being outdated, so shouldn't completely be trusted either. Due to the community efforts, overally the OSM data should be better maintained and errors can be fixed resulting in better map quality. But the big thing is, that you cannot trust any map data 100% - and if only it has been invalidated by a tree falling onto the road.
Is the Tesla system prone to driving into water?
With Tesla pulling map information used for routing in the summon feature from OSM, this gives not only an overall incentive for Tesla owners to enhance the OSM database, but also gives them the ability to add the data they personally need, making the feature more useful in places which didn't have good data yet.
I wonder though, if Tesla could use the data collected by the vehicles in general to improve OSM. As Tesla seems to track special driving situations for building and enhancing the Autopilot features, they could also automatically detect wrong or missing map information, whenever a Tesla drives "off" the map. Based on that information, they could contribute to OSM a lot.
