I'm having a difficult time why you'd think Tesla would face no limitations in Korea. With their cars, I understand since South Korea needs to appear like they're being fair to foreign car makers to satisfy free trade agreements. However, if Tesla in the future tries to launch an autonomous ride-sharing network in South Korea... and the jobs of 250k taxi cab drivers in the country are threatened to extinction, I can imagine it'll rile up things and Tesla could face the same resistance that Uber faced, maybe even more.
Korea has a medallion system for taxi's. It's something like 100k to get a taxi license in the country. Tesla will just have to buy medallions from existing owners.
VW did this to themselves in Korea. They refused to give any compensation or fix their vehicles so they got shut down. It's the 4th or 5th largest market for Audi globally and the prospects of them selling again soon are pretty low.
I think it's going to be a long time before autonomous driving works in inner cities. Autonomous driving is better suited for highways than city driving. It will only take 1 drunk passenger to mess everything up. Autonomous vehicles will still have drivers even if they can handle the driving part on their own.
Autonomous vehicles will be good for driving drunk drivers home in their own vehicles. There is a system like that in Korea. You drive your car to the bar, drink, and then when you go home you call a driver service and within 5 minutes a driver shows up to drive you and your car home for $15.
Here's one scenario where autonomous vehicles will never work in:
In a lot of inner cities there are blind corners and buildings in the way. Radar and cameras will never be able to see around corners like a human can. In Seoul, a lot of roads and intersections use mirrors to drive. You have to look at these convex mirrors to see approaching traffic. You listen for oncoming cars, you watch shadows to see if a car is approaching.
Autonomous vehicle cameras are not sophisticated enough to inverse an image on a convex mirror, calculate speed and avoid oncoming traffic. Taxi drivers will exist for a very long time in inner cities.
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