Imagine a safer and more reliant car that you can enter, tell it where you want to go, then be driven to your destination without the hassle of having to drive the vehicle yourself. This is a self-driving car, (or a driverless car) these are not your average cars that you drive from point A to point B, they are automatic driving cars that drive you to your destination without the stress of driving, and can possibly save your life from multiple distractions.
“Driverless cars are much safer than human driven cars.” Explains Rutt Bridges who has recently written a book on driverless vehicles. “ Some experts believe they will reduce accidents by as much as 90 percent, and save 30,000 lives a year (and that’s just in America).” These cars will be able to end distractions to drivers that ultimately cause their death, such as texting and driving. This is also because that 93% of crashes are caused distractions and driver error. Not only will these cars save lives, but they will also be much cheaper. “If people use robotaxis instead of buying and maintaining their own cars, they can save up to $4900 a year, or $6500 a year if they will ride share with another person.”
Driverless cars also can result in less congested highways. Highways will sometimes slow traffic down due to recent accidents, or because of construction. While driverless cars can make less congested highways with lessing accidents and making transportation much smoother. Rutt says that the cars can easily communicate with each other, and if the lead car hits its braked, all the other cars behind will also hit their brakes within a thousandth of a second.
Although these sound like great vehicles, they still have some issues with driving through heavy rain, snow and fog. There are also instances where the driver, or computer in this case, must decide to make ethical decisions like swerve left or right, for instance, swerve left and get 3 people in a car injured, or swerve left and kill one person on a motorcycle. Decisions like these are things that the computer are not yet ready for. There have also been reported crashes of the cars being hit because it was going too slow, when the driverless car was actually going the speed limit.
It will still take very long for these cars to be fully developed to an extent where they are completely reliable. Google, the current leader in driverless cars, has said that it will be decades before you can put you can even put a child in a driverless car and send him or her off to school with no parent. “They hope to begin offering “robotaxi” services as soon as 2020, and maybe by 2018. But only in a few cities.” Says Rutt Bridges. These cars are efficient in almost every sense of driving, but, will these cars ever be widely accepted? That’s something that can only be determined as these cars become safer and more reliable.