Not so sure about those medieval towns: you can't navigate them by bus, anything rail-related is out of question for the terrain, but transport is still essential. It won't be internal combustion engines, but still cars.

I don't believe the mantra. Not every road is in the US and there are more driving scenarios than highways. There's a long way to go until self driving cars will be able to master the tiny streets and complex (behavioral) patterns fond, say, in a medieval Italian town. And there is more to driving and the car as a product than just commute. Will BMW change the slogan from "aus Freude am Fahren" to "play Solitaire while being bored?" I think, manual driving will be always at least an option. And, if self driving really becomes a sorted thing, it's the manual driving option that will define a car as a product.

Roomba / iRobot is years behind the Chinese companies. We just got an Ecovacs X1 Omni - a mopping vacuum bot with actual rotating mop scrubbers, AI vision obstacle avoidance, LIDAR mapping, and most importantly fully automated water fill & mop pad cleaning at the base station. We fill a clean water tank & empty the dirty one about once a week. Floors are spotless - huge difference from static cloth mopping bots.

Meanwhile, iRobot still hadn’t figured out how to make an effective stand-alone mop bot, much less an auto fill station or combined bot that actually works. Roborock and Ecovacs products launch in China 6-12 months before their US launch. By the time Roomba has a decent mop bot, the X2 or X3 will probably be out offering integration with home plumbing to avoid any manual intervention for months at a time.

EDIT: commenters are asking what works offline from Roborock / Ecovacs. For the self-cleaning-mop generation like the X1 Omni:

- Roborock obstacle avoidance is local, but works better with cloud.

- Roborock can be controlled by a local home automation server without internet access.

- Ecovacs obstacle avoidance requires cloud.

- Ecovacs control requires cloud.

I remembered these stats from a Youtube video that I can't find; probably in my partner's history since we watched reviews on the TV together.

I picked the X1 Omni over the Roborock because it has superior mopping performance on tile floors, but I think both would be good options. It seems like Roborock is more privacy compatible.

a short series in text will be nice too, reading text is 10x than watching a video, plus it's safe at work