Why Europeans will not have an easy life
How actually pathetic it is that such a technology thats already working in the US, in China (local brands), can be imported into any African country and just work there.
But no, in Europe you have to suck a thousand cocks from so-called regulators to even be allowed this feature to be enabled.
The irony that an average farmer in China or an African villager is actually more free in that regard than average European.
Sure, it may not work as well, lack of real roads, signs, reception – may render the feature literally unusable.
But its technical limitation which are getting better every day. Not some bureaucrat telling you how to live.
And we are not talking about some real full-driven vehicle without a real human driver at all.
We are talking about the assisting feature which does not create any new complexity or responsibility shift.
It is just a feature to make your driving a little bit more comfortable. Nothing changes fundamentally – you are still responsible for managing your vehicle and ensuring that you behave safely on the road, meaning you have to pay attention at all times ever still.
I’m not gonna argue about if self-driving is safe or not safe, because it does not matter, because the principle of operation does not change, you humans still in charge and responsible for everything.
It is the twist that you, a European, praising yourself to be rich in the Netherlands (all nice and rich), but you can’t use it – you can’t import yourself a car and expect it to work because your local cocksuckers forbid you from doing so.
"But road safety!"
But blah blah road safety. This is absolutely shit argument here.
Road safety is not made by forbidding some driver’s assist features.
It is by designing better roads with good speed limits and infrastructure supporting the correct flow and optimal driving experience.
Having speed limits in place and enforced, roundabouts, narrower lanes, dedicated and physically separated bike lanes and so on.
Roads designed to reduce errors and prevent accidents. Which you already pay taxes for, win-win public benefits.
Not for micromanaging which supervised assist feature runs in your private vehicle.
Consider the opposite. Tomorrow, a fancy new ML app releases, and every vehicle who supports controls of hardware can be upgraded into the most advanced self driving app ever.
Everyone can just plug into their ESP port and patch it up, and their car has a feature which is as advanced as Tesla or not as good. Maybe decent enough.
Did your roads suddenly become unsafe?
Of course they not, because you had speed limits, you had roundabouts, you had levees, you had road markings, and so on.
Or even worse – if all cars suddenly downgraded into 30 y.o clunkers with zero features – no ABS, ESP, zero little helpers we developed over the years…
Or worse – the same FSD software become glitchy – way to unpredictably to even understand.
Will everything burn down into chaos? Hell no!
The infrastructure itself prevents chaos. Same fancy roads you made over the last 50 years will keep it stable.
No full India overnight.
And remember, there’s still a human sitting there and watching over. If they screw up, it is their responsibility, not the software’s.
Even so, surprisingly, the roads would become much safer because now everyone would assume that their neighbor driver is running a dump software and not actually paying attention to the road.
Which they should have been doing at all times in the first place!
Nothing fundamentally changed in your relationship with the rules of the road and our drivers.
You dont need a permission from some multi-letter agency to drive your car with the features you want – as long as you follow the rules of the road and do not screw with others.
Good job – you are paying taxes to be less free.
Get the difference – that you pay for real public benefit (safer roads) vs oppression of your rights (which damn car you drive)
While the average African villager is disadvantaged in terms of income, infrastructure, accessibility to import, they are still fundamentally much better because they do not have some kind of fancy agency to tell them what they can’t and can’t do.
This is just your human rights violation to run your cars and your software however the fuck you want.
What you do with your machine is your business. Not theirs.
No easy life for you – by your own hands
Think about it. The technological process slowly but surely making the lines of everyone better. The self-driving cars are one of those examples, where just the presence of it saves you a lot of effort having to drive around, the time being freed to actually enjoy your life.
Yet while on the other side of the continent some guys are doing whole country road trips purely on autopilot and citing that as a great achievement – you are being left behind.
And even worse, not because you cannot afford it, not because it is expensive or they don’t import in your place.
It is because your own pricks – who you elected – are gatekeeping the tech for an easy life.
The cars are just one example. Consider all the others.