Numerous people wonder what it would be like to have driverless cars. Several people have depicted driverless vehicles in science fiction films, books, and cartoons. General Motors (GM) planned to be ready to road test a driverless vehicle by 2015. However, a company not even in the automotive industry has beaten GM to road testing a driverless car. This company is Google, the internet search engine giant.
On October 9, 2010, Google reported to The New York Times that it has successfully road tested a fleet of driverless cars on a variety of California roads. Google used its artificial intelligence technology, consisting of sensors, cameras, GPS, and massive computer databanks to convert six Toyota Priuses and one Audi TT into driverless vehicles. They have been secretly road testing this fleet in normal city and freeway traffic situations. The vehicles have been tested on San Francisco’s Lombard Street, the Golden Gate Bridge, throughout the city of Mountain View, and on the Pacific Coast Highway.
Altogether, the fleet has already logged in 140,000 miles between the seven vehicles, with little interference from human drivers. They logged in 1,000 miles with no human driver interference at all. So far, the only accident that has occurred was due to human error, when someone rear-ended one of the vehicles while it was stopped at a stoplight.
Is Google wasting its resources?
Google stated that their driverless car technology wouldn’t be ready for mass production for at least another eight years. Some people think that consumers wouldn’t buy them even if the cars were available on the market today. These people think that Google is wasting resources on a useless product. One argument is that most humans don’t trust machines to do their thinking for them.
However, there are already ample examples of how humans constantly use machines on a daily basis, even though they distrust those same machines. For instance, millions of people use cars with cruise controls. Thousands of humans use airplanes with “auto-pilot” controls. Some governments already use driverless vehicles for various purposes. Thousands of other robotic machines and tools are used daily, despite human distrust and fears.
Another argument is that the driverless car technology heavily relies on computers, which currently have a tendency to get glitches, security issues, and viruses. Thus, the driverless car technology could also be susceptible to these problems. It could create potential safety hazards which may result in large amounts of fatalities, serious injuries, and property damage. Therefore, consumers wouldn’t want this type of transportation system.
However, we already have a transportation system that creates large amounts of potential safety hazards, with all the same outcomes. More than 37,000 people died in the U.S. in 2008, and 2,222 were killed in the UK in 2009 due to car accidents. There were 24,690 serious injuries in the UK alone in 2009 due to car accidents. The majority of these accidents were due to human error in some format, with the rest of them being due to vehicles malfunctioning. Moreover, most modern vehicles already do use computers and some type of sensors to maintain the vehicle’s operational systems.
The third argument is that many people just enjoy doing the driving themselves. Therefore, they wouldn’t want a machine doing the driving for them. Google has the perfect solution. Google’s system is designed so that the human driver decides when to drive or when to use the automated driving system. If the driver wants the pleasure of doing the driving, all he or she has to do is push a button or step on the brake. It really wouldn’t be much different than what it’s like to use cruise control, which is very common nowadays. Moreover, Google’s system allows the driver’s personal driving style to be programmed into the system. The automated driver can drive offensively (more aggressively) or defensively (more timidly).
Google’s reasoning
Google is basing their ideas and technology off of the current driving habits and attitudes of consumers. Recent driving surveys and market research indicate that consumers would approve of this type of technology. People have indicated they’d love to have transportation they could rely on to get them home safely when they were incapacitated.
Consumers have also indicated that they would continue doing things that could possibly endanger themselves and others while driving. People can easily become very distracted while driving. Yet, despite the distractions and the knowledge of knowing it’s unsafe for them to drive, some keep driving anyways.
Google’s theory is that it’s easier to just change the current car technology to fit consumers’ driving habits than it would be to change those bad driving habits. Their belief is that you’re always going to have humans being distracted while they’re driving. Therefore, you’re always going to have accidents caused by human errors and poor judgment. Google decided that the best way to get everyone home safely was to create vehicles that will do the driving when the driver is too distracted or incapacitated for some reason.
Current obstacles
One of the biggest obstacles to Google’s driverless technology becoming massed produced any time soon are the legal issues. Basically, all the driving laws and regulations have been created with the idea that there would be a human driver controlling the vehicle. All the insurance policies have been designed for human drivers. So it becomes a serious matter of who should be held accountable for damages if there ever is an accident involving a driverless vehicle.
This especially becomes complex if the technology advances to the point where it truly is driverless and no humans are involved with the actual driving. Thus, consumers will just have to wait until the legal system and financial industry catches up to the driverless vehicle industry. It should be interesting to see what happens with this kind of automotive technology in the next few years.
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