I find it so odd that automated driving and auto-safety features (adaptive cruise, lane assist, etc.) are being so aggressively developed.
These features have never once appealed to me and I can't imagine using them even if I had them. I find it very hard to square the "American Love of Driving" and the cultural connotations that driving has in the US with systems that relegate the driver to a passenger ...
Maybe for stop and go rush hour driving ... but beyond that, I don't see the appeal.
The pay isn't always great, humans require sleep, and freight needs to be delivered. I am still amazed trains are piloted but they are and that is far simpler to automate than trucks.
Once trucking becomes automated you will have trucks delivering at all times to warehouses, scheduling around traffic patters. Whereas humans are not necessarily best at driving at night, vision and physiological reasons, computers could drive at hours when traffic is always the lightest.
Lower insurance rates. And I don't care how much you love driving, no one loves to accidentally rear-end someone that just slammed on their brakes while you were distracted by checking adjacent lane prior to moving over to get to an exit. And automation can help both situations (when putting on the lane change signal, I want some type of alarm if a car is entering my blind spot, for example).
Not that I disagree with you about the American love of driving, but that notion is part truth and partially a creation of automotive marketing. Frankly, many cars aren't that enjoyable to drive, and driving an enjoyable car in traffic is usually not very enjoyable either.
These features have never once appealed to me and I can't imagine using them even if I had them. I find it very hard to square the "American Love of Driving" and the cultural connotations that driving has in the US with systems that relegate the driver to a passenger ...
Maybe for stop and go rush hour driving ... but beyond that, I don't see the appeal.