There actually is a myth in circulation in some places that China’s electrical vehicle tech is somehow advanced over everyone else’s (my father got sucked in by that one). Tearing one apart is one way to counter that.

The question for me isn’t whether or not there’s a difference that I might be able to see if I were paying attention to the picture quality, it’s whether the video quality is sufficiently bad to distract me from the content. And only hypercompressed macroblocked-to-hell-and-back ancient MPEG1 files or multiply-recopied VHS tapes from the Dark Ages are ever that bad for me. In general, I’m perfectly happy with 480p. Of course, I might just have a higher-than-average immunity to bad video. (Similarly, I can spot tearing if I’m looking for it, but I do have to be looking for it.)

If the bots are required to have paid transit passes and if they’re confined to off-peak hours when the subways aren’t full anyway, this could actually be a net win for mass transit: they’re putting money into the system while consuming relatively few resources, so the bots can fund improvements that benefit humans.