Self-Driving Cars Here In A Few Years

Self-Driving Cars Here In A Few Years

In a few years we can expect self-driving cars to appear on the streets. What can we expect from this new technology? What benefits and drawbacks do they bring?

The technology could really eat away from the millions of car accidents that are currently taking place in the United States. Then, self-driving cars will be great for better road utilization as humans are pretty lousy at driving precisely and keeping their car in a very even gap and a close gap.

Self-driving cars will have to run on small super computers in order to prevent accidents as each traffic light has to be correctly identified under all-weather driving conditions. New and more precise camera mounted on the self-driving car will ensure that lane keeping functions perfectly. This will increase comfort as well as safety.

Of course, the driver can regain control of the vehicle at any point however if a car is capable of driving better than any human you may wonder why should he even regain control in the first place. Self-driving cars promise less accidents as computers don’t drink, don’t sleep and they know the rules of the road.

Computers can be programmed to operate the accelerator and break in a way that preserves kinetic energy rather than dumping fuel in the cylinders at one moment only to convert that speed into break, dust and heat. Even current cruise control can save 14% of fuel when implemented.

Self-driving cars will also bring in greater productivity as the average American spends right now 200 hours a year just by cleaning and maintaining their car. Among the negative aspects of self-driving cars is that they take away our pleasure of driving.

Car enthusiasts may turn down self-driving cars because they fear that it will take away their pleasure in driving however even driving can often become boring, especially commuting. Other people may reject self-driving cars because they may not trust computers however it is worthy to point out that computer technology doubles in power and efficiency every 2 years so this negative aspect might be easily eradicated from the equation.

People also fear that this technology will cost a fortune, however if we look at the modern facilities like adaptive cruise control, self-parking and navigation we find out that we already pay a huge sum of money for all these facilities and they could be easily integrated into the computer of a self-car.

There will however come a time when all this technology that we have in our smart cars today, will become ubiquitous and because of the decreasing cost of computer power it can easily be integrated into any road vehicle, further decreasing the cost of smart technology.

This dramatic reduction in price will also enable the mass manufacturing of self-driving cars and in the near future, self-driving cars may be mandatory due to changes in legislation. These changes in legislation may be necessary strictly out of security reasons as self-driving cars are a great asset when it comes to avoiding accidents and saving lives.

So will the self-driving car technology benefit us? Maybe, but there sure will be a lot of problems in the beginning. What do you think?

Posted by Melanie Mendoza on Thursday May 08 2014, 3:49 AM EST. All trademarks acknowledged. Filed under Technology. Comments and Trackbacks closed. Follow responses: RSS 2.0