march83 wrote:... restricting Uber and other private companies would probably set the industry back significantly and delay the inevitable positives that will eventually be reached.
Thank you for such a quick reply, March83. There seems to be politics in almost everything thesedays. It has been written before that the big wheels in Detroit making money from big yank tank sales like to keep on friendly terms with their politicians. No doubt this fuels the legacy of Henry Ford still, even though the whole concept of some 'horseless-carriage' was flawed from the beginning, if only with the benefit of hindsight and modern electrical engineering.
The size of the horseless-carriage was scaled to the size of a horse, not a human. The size of the motor was a large contributing factor to the massive size of our personal transport in the twentieth century. Now though, with new battery and brushless motor technology available online, it would not take someone with the right welder, 3-D printer and a lathe to build a complete, roadworthy small electric, waterproof four-wheeler in their garage for somewhere not far north of ten grand,
Uber et al. are restricting themselves by their narrowminded, outdated 1914 Henry Ford belief in heavy metal SUVs that unfortunately kill people with they encounter a bug in the software and flatten them. There is no need any longer for most people in the big cities to rely on such old-fashioned transportation now. Perhaps one reason is plain old safety, due to all the heavy metal vehicles on the roads. If you'll excuse the pun, there will need to be some point of 'critical mass' when enough of the population have adapted to lightweight electric personal transportation so that the trend becomes the norm'.
Maybe right now it would be looked upon as bad marketing to be filmed testing lightweight vehicles in public, because of the public's love affair with their big cars? I am sure that these fellows have worked out by now that the only reason that people need such heavy vehicles is to feel safe in the event of a collision with other heavy vehicles. I just hope that this world can make that next evolutionary step as soon as possible and let Mr Ford rest in peace, and start driving, (or riding in if AI controlled), small, lightweight, efficient, electric cars that do not squash people that they run into because they are not heavy enough.