There is nothing hot under the gas tank. Just the exhaust, which is not hot enough to ignite the gas. Also, the car in the picture seems like it was stationary. Please tell me, how anything in a combustion engine vehicle could be hot enough after about an hour.

No.

I’ve worked on too many crappy old cars to belive this. First of all, the gas tank is on the other end of the car from the engine unless you’re driving a Trabant. It’s possible to have a fuel line rupture in the engine bay, but if that happens basically every gas or diesel car has this magical thing that happens - turn the key off, and the fuel pump stops running, so you’re not spraying an entire gas tank on a fire. If the gas tank itself is punctured, you don’t get a fire unless you’re literally lying under it with a lit match.

I’ve had two motorcycles break a fuel line while running, and one of them had a gravity fed fuel system - so the gas DID keep flowing out of the tank. It didn’t catch fire, and I only noticed when the engine stopped. Another one DID catchtank, when the gas spilled on the hot exhaust (and it was a 24 year old bike, not a nearly new Tesla) and I put it out with the contents of an outdoor ash tray. (sand and rainwater)

So gas won’t ignite when you puncture the tank without an ignition source. But stick an ice pick (or part of the car you’ve hit) through the battery, and it will light off on its own. I want more EVs, I’d like one myself, but people like you posting easily disprovable things about EVs just look silly and hold everyone back.

They can spontaneously combust, so near close to explode.

First, to highways. Tell me, is rail maintenance profitable? How about for maglevs or retrofitted bus networks? It’s an expense, it will always be an expense. That’s an expense that will just have to be paid (as if it would disappear anyways). However, in a system where uber owns the cars or even the cars being a public service to be maintained, this will allow millions of Americans to stop spending the $10,000 a year it takes to own one, instead maybe paying approx. $1,200 a year instead. Yes, I threw out a very high estimate on purpose, but it is still far cheaper for the average rider than the current car system. For those who will complain about that high price tag, charging $0.10 per mile (with EVs, maintenance costs for service would be much cheaper overall), the poorest would have a cheaper method for when they would rather take it for whatever reason.

Another thing, profitability is one of the greatest determinants of political will. Innumerable projects have died once the political will was burned out by the hefty price tag. If uber has shown anything, that will would not die in my idea.

Second, much regional travel would now happen via train and buses as train networks expand to inter-city lines and buses take up high density locations. The logic is simple: Why do you drive the highway in the first place? It’s usually to drive 45 minutes to 1 hour to a job site or college/ school or that rare shopping trip or even friends correct? Some trips may only take 5 minutes, some may have to go 2-3 hours. My idea allows for more greater carpooling. If the uber computers saw that a location had many people coming together to go to a single location, the vehicle used could swap to a bus of various sizes and the app or via phonecall or whatever menhod of communication, you could choose the carpool option which would allow you to walk up to 5 minutes to a hailed bus which would allow the riders in and take them to a list of nearby destinations. Of course this bus would be manned by a driver, but that would be more than offset by the extensive amount of people taking that bus to the designated area. Unlike uber, the bus driver would be a worker for the company & paid for managing the travels, not usually having to drive themselves if ever. A pretty nice job no?

As for actual cities (Cape coral is not a city, nor is 90% of the USA), they are going to go the way of ebikes, bus public transport, trams, trains, etc. as before as the place densifies via infill development like today and everyone who wants their suburbs will be happy and those who want dense cities will be happy.

As for the legal hurdles, that would be easy: Uber would have to pay if their vehicle fucked up, but that would just be another small expense as uber could sue hundreds of thousands of people who would drive like idiots and crash into their FSD vehicles. A FSD car would have a MUCH lower chance of causing an accident versus a human afterall.

If the car was proven to be in human control mode at that time, it is the responsibility of the driver of the FSD car. They are the one who crashed it afterall.

If the crash was proven by something like a black box in the car or the log to be because of a software error, it’s the cost to the company who wrote the software.

Poor maintenance? Uber.

That question had very little thought put into it.

Long story short: Highways are an expense, but they will not be expanded by charging people for taking them, saving lots of infrastructure money and encouraging train usage. From the next city, you could just hail one of the uber cars afterall. The system would save each individual person by giving many of the advantages of a car and allowing buses a chance to regain popularity while socializing maintenance costs and the like to all users of the service. This would make car ownership an expensive luxury item versus the necessity it is today for many people and give opportunities to those economically disadvantaged without them having to move. Best part? Cities would not need it. They would focus on trams, buses, subways, etc to manage their local density while not needing the additional parking.

With full self driving, there’s still major legal hurdles involved. If a self-driving car kills someone, who’s to blame? The driver not driving? The programmers? The company? It’s a serious issue that I think will kill the whole concept.

The same entity that is responsible when an industrial machine malfunctions and kills someone. The same entity that is responsible when a light falls from the ceiling and hits a member of the audience, or a plane’s engine falls off and lands in someone’s house. Responsibility could fall on the engineer who designed the machine, or the installer who put in the lights, or the maintainer who failed to perform required inspections, or the operator of the facility, or the owner of the equipment.

It really isn’t a complicated issue, it just hasn’t been investigated and brought to the courts yet. The plaintiffs will be pointing the finger at the entity with the most money; the defendants will be pointing at the plaintiffs if they can, and at their co-defendants if they can’t.