Autonomous vehicles are statistically less likely to hit a pedestrian than you are. So why do nearly 75% of people refuse to ride in one?

In this episode, we cut through the sci-fi marketing and crash headlines to examine what's actually happening on our roads right now. We start with the deceptive language selling you a "full self-driving" car that legally requires your hands on the wheel at all times, then break down the SAE's Level 0–5 scale — and why those levels aren't a fixed feature you buy at a dealership but a dynamic, second-by-second relationship between human and machine that shifts mid-drive.

We dig into the great sensor war between Waymo's laser-powered LiDAR arrays and Tesla's vision-only camera approach, why both philosophies have severe blind spots (literally, at dawn and dusk), and what a landmark 2024 Nature Communi ...