Future Of Driverless Cars
From the moment Google announced the road toward a future of driverless cars, the public was abuzz. Wherever you went, you could not escape the questions of curious internet browsers. “What do they look like? Will I be able to use one?” they queried. While the buzz has died down, pressing questions still remain about these autonomous cars. Even among excited fans of this new technology, few understand the inner workings of these vehicles. Moreover, technology rarely stays dormant for long. How will this technology advance in the future? What industries could this advancement be applied to? How will it affect our daily lives? Even more urgent is the question of our own security and well-being. Whether these cars are safe or not will determine
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Each car is equipped with a GPS which locates where the car itself is, while an assortment of sensors on the outside of the vehicle, such as laser rangefinders, radar, and video, senses the car’s environment. The car’s software then fuses all of this sensory data together to build a detailed three-dimensional model of the car’s environment, keeping in mind how fast the objects in its environment are moving. Based on this three-dimensional model, the car’s control system decides the right path for the car to follow. The control system must be able to discern crucial information, such as other vehicles’ positions, traffic lights, or a pedestrian crossing the street, from insignificant …show more content…
With such a complicated process, it’s natural to assume that something may go wrong. When something brakes down, lives will be put at stake. However, to determine if self-driving cars are dangerous, we must compare the risk of self-driven cars to the risk of human-driven cars. According to the National Highway Traffic Administration, in the United States alone, 28 people every day die from drunk driving, 3,179 die every year from distracted driving, and 846 die every year from drowsy driving. Moreover, 9,246 people die every from irresponsible speeding. While they may be at a higher risk of mechanical malfunction, autonomous cars would not be subject to these problems that humans face, potentially saving thousands of lives a year. Furthermore, over the two million miles driven by Google’s self-driving cars, only one accident, which was very minor, has been attributed to an error in the self-driving
Each car is equipped with a GPS which locates where the car itself is, while an assortment of sensors on the outside of the vehicle, such as laser rangefinders, radar, and video, senses the car’s environment. The car’s software then fuses all of this sensory data together to build a detailed three-dimensional model of the car’s environment, keeping in mind how fast the objects in its environment are moving. Based on this three-dimensional model, the car’s control system decides the right path for the car to follow. The control system must be able to discern crucial information, such as other vehicles’ positions, traffic lights, or a pedestrian crossing the street, from insignificant …show more content…
With such a complicated process, it’s natural to assume that something may go wrong. When something brakes down, lives will be put at stake. However, to determine if self-driving cars are dangerous, we must compare the risk of self-driven cars to the risk of human-driven cars. According to the National Highway Traffic Administration, in the United States alone, 28 people every day die from drunk driving, 3,179 die every year from distracted driving, and 846 die every year from drowsy driving. Moreover, 9,246 people die every from irresponsible speeding. While they may be at a higher risk of mechanical malfunction, autonomous cars would not be subject to these problems that humans face, potentially saving thousands of lives a year. Furthermore, over the two million miles driven by Google’s self-driving cars, only one accident, which was very minor, has been attributed to an error in the self-driving