Technology

Okay, I watched it.

Summary of video:

1. self driving cars are seen as a quick fix
2. we don’t have full self driving capabilities yet - Elon overstated his cars actual abilities
3. adding lanes has never fixed traffic - demand just fills the new capacity. Therefore self driving cars will make traffic worse.
4. cars are generally terrible and inefficient, hurray for trains
5. US cities were built for cars and not public transit: we should build denser cities instead of all this.

1 and 2 are beside the point and can be discarded.

3 is the core argument and is circular, essentially saying that anything that increases capacity will make traffic worse. If this seems fundamentally flawed, it’s because it is. It assumes infinite demand. You could easily apply this same logic to trains: add more frequent trains and riders will just flock to enjoy the new capacity until they are crowded again. The reality is that there is a right amount of capacity, and the question is what kinds of cars can best utilize the lane capacity we have.

4 and 5 are good points but mainly argue that we should not ONLY focus on self driving cars as a complete transportation panacea, which is true. But no one is doing that. Therefore this is a straw man argument.

The silent presumption of this entire video is that the sole, entire hope of self driving cars is to reduce urban traffic congestion. This is patently false. They also aim to improve on the abysmal safety record of human drivers, and improve fuel efficiency by taking people’s lead foot off the gas pedal, and finally to make access to a car more economical for those who don’t own one or can’t drive because of disability or age.

So basically, it’s what you’d expect from a YouTube video: some random guy leaning way too hard on a couple of limp arguments to make a sensational video that will get clicks because it has extreme claims in the title. Throw in some Elon hate and cherry picked videos of self-driving errors and the narrative is complete.