Unpopular Autonomous Driving Opinions | Generated by AI
Question: What are some unpopular opinions about autonomous driving?
Answer:
Here are several genuinely unpopular (or at least contrarian) opinions about self-driving cars that you don’t often see in mainstream tech coverage:
- Full autonomy (Level 5) will never be solved in our lifetimes. The “long tail” of rare edge cases is effectively infinite, and the liability + regulatory hurdles make true driverless operation everywhere economically impossible outside of tightly controlled geofenced areas.
- Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” approach is closer to a very sophisticated Level 2+ system than a real path to Level 4/5. Vision-only + end-to-end neural nets may scale impressively in common scenarios, but they still fail catastrophically in novel situations in ways that radar/lidar + explicit mapping (Waymo/Cruise style) handle more robustly.
- Most people claiming they’ll never trust a robotaxi actually will once it’s 5–10× cheaper and more convenient than owning a car or using Uber. Human resistance to autonomy melts away remarkably fast when money and time are on the table (see seatbelts, ABS, elevators, airplanes).
- Autonomous vehicles will increase overall miles driven and urban sprawl, not reduce congestion. Empty robotaxis cruising around to reposition or pick up the next passenger, plus people sending their cars on errands or to park far away, will add substantial “zero-occupancy” miles.
- The safety debate is largely settled already: even today’s Level 2 systems (Tesla Autopilot, GM Super Cruise, etc.) have lower crash rates per mile than the average human in many conditions. The remaining fatalities get disproportionate attention because they’re novel and the companies are forced to report them.
- Waymo is the only company that has actually solved self-driving in a meaningful commercial way right now (2025), and everyone else—even Tesla—is years behind in real driverless deployment at scale.
- The biggest barrier isn’t technical anymore—it’s insurance, litigation, and local politics. A single high-profile fatality or city council vote can freeze an entire program for years.
- Self-driving tech will kill more motorcyclists and cyclists than it saves pedestrians. Motorcycles and bikes frequently get misclassified or predicted poorly because they violate the “normal car” assumptions most systems are trained on.
- Most promised societal benefits (fewer cars on the road, huge drop in parking lots, drunk driving eliminated) are decades away at best, while the near-term reality is just expensive ride-hail with a safety driver removed.
- A lot of the loudest “self-driving will never work” critics secretly hope it fails because they enjoy driving and don’t want their hobby/lifestyle disrupted.
These views tend to get downvoted or dismissed in enthusiast forums, tech-bro circles, and traditional automotive circles alike—which is exactly why they qualify as unpopular.
References:
- Waymo Safety Reports
- Tesla Vehicle Safety Reports
- Various discussions on Reddit r/SelfDrivingCars, X threads from industry insiders (e.g., Missy Cummings, Brad Templeton, Phil Koopman), and NHTSA autonomous vehicle incident database (2021–2025)