Letting Your Kids Ride Alone In An Autonomous Self-Driving Car: Ever Or Never?

There's a lot of hand-wringing these days about letting your children be solo passengers in ridesharing cars run by the conventional ridesharing services. Some parents say that they would never let their young offspring be alone, i.e., without a trusted adult passenger, when going in a ridesharing vehicle, and are horrified that other parents even consider this rather untoward notion to be conceivable. Meanwhile, some parents indicate that when pressed for time and having no other viable choice, they hesitantly and reluctantly let their kids use a ridesharing service. For those that use a ride-sharing service as a last resort to get their son or daughter to baseball practice after school or get to a piano recital, such parents try to protect themselves and their children as much as possible. They get the child to take a picture of the driver and depending upon the ridesharing service can track via a mobile app the progress of the vehicle during its journey, along with sometimes having the child activate their FaceTime app on their own smartphone and try to let the parent enjoin virtually for the ride.