HOLY FUCKING SHIT JUST USE TRAINS OH MY FUCKING GOD 
Instead of a conventional train with one or more locomotive cars pulling a long chain of unpowered cargo cars, each rail car is a self-powered electric vehicle.
bazinga
hear me out, what if we hooked up those self-powered electric vehicles to unpowered trailers to increase their cargo capacity
Look, if this is how they need to process their grief over the fact that trains were always better than cars and trucks then let them have it. We don’t need to be proud, just get the trains running.
Taking an existing concept and actively working to make it worse and nonfunctional is the techbro prime directive
"When you're looking at a terminal, a traditional freight train is about three miles long, which means you need a place to park three miles of a rolling stock. You need a buffer of about 300 containers. You have trucks going back and forth. It's a big operation with a lot of real estate and a lot of cost. Our vehicles can interface like a semi truck to go directly where they need to go, load and unload you to get out of the way," Howard told me.
So just... make a shorter train? You can make trains more flexible without going down to "each car has its own motor". The only reason why freight trains are so long now is because the companies wanted to cut costs by reducing the number of drivers (even though this comes at a cost to safety and worker well-being). Of course, they need to believe in autonomous rail cars so they can fantasize about automating away their need for workers instead of just employing more people.
A better idea would be to shift some of that cargo to our underutilized railways—here, the idea of platooning is an old one, better known as a "train." Parallel Systems hopes to do just that with its second-generation autonomous battery-electric freight railcar.
No FUCKING way
There's literally no downside to having a huge spiderweb of autonomous vehicles each trying to perform their own unique pathfinding
There are no conceivable consequences
:what-the-hell:
