The thing that really feels possible to me is long haul autonomous trucks only on the highway. They can transport themselves between depots and then an actual driver does the tricky in-city transit and delivery/pickup.
I would be extremely opposed to this on efficiency grounds.
Semi trucks are awful. They’re horrible polluters, and they represent 99% of the road damage being done, despite only kicking in 35% of road upkeep cost. This is a drain on the public purse in exchange for more pollution and more accidents.
A far more sane policy would be to shift as much freight over to rail as possible, and reserve semi trucks for the last miles between rail head and customer.
