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Originally Posted by CanadianGatorBacon
Those are some big assumptions. Given that you list your location in Maryland, explain to me why people commute in and out of D.C. in 5 mile an hour stop and go traffic for hours a day in their high end Porsches, sport oriented BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Aston Martins? Must be the rush they get when the tap the gas and hear their muti-turbo or high displacement engines whisper to life, as they lazily roll the wheel to sweep around a bend pulling zero lateral Gs hardly stripping a molecule off of their ultra low-profile tires. I bet you their thinking about how glad they are that the factory engineers reduced the unsprung weight, stiffened the suspension and torsional rigidity of the frame and body using CFRP bits to keep the overall weight down and lower the center of gravity from the previous model as their coffee tilts a faction of a degree in the cup holder (a very sporting feature). They must really appreciate the smoothness of the gates between shifts from 2nd to 2nd (you know because leave in 2nd to avoid shifting out of first). Oh wait, most of these cars don't even offer manuals, because who would ever thought that people would be OK with driving an automatic performance machine, because driver control/experience/feel/fun.
Having grown up part of my life in Miami, I knew my fair share of exotic vehicle drivers. Ya, they loved to go fast (in a straight line, from stop light to stop light). Image was far more important than the actual driving experience. Most of them couldn't tell you a single technical detail about their cars, except for maybe the color code for the paint they custom ordered.
There are a ton of luxury products in the world today that make zero sense to most people, yet those with the means buy them anyway. I'd peg the chances of self-driving exotics to be an almost certainty. Also, one said self-driving cars had to be self-driving 100% of the time.
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I did say that. To reach the ultimate goal of zero accidents and zero fatalities, all vehicles must be centrally controlled, which makes high performance pointless.
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A manual transmission can be set to "comfort", "sport", and "track" modes simply by the technique and speed at which you shift it; it doesn't need "modes", modes are for manumatics that try to behave like a real 3-pedal manual transmission. If you can money-shift it, it's a manual transmission. "Yeah, but NO ONE puts an automatic trans shift knob on a manual transmission."