Are Self-Driving Vehicles Really Better for Humankind and Society? New technologies sprout up everyday like new toys, new electronics and especially new cars. According to CNN Money, 2016 set a high record of 17.5 million cars sold in the United States. Since each year is getting more advanced, self driving cars have been the new topic of interest. This idea of driverless cars was first imagined in 2009 by a company called Autonomous Cars, led by Sebastian Thrun. Over the past few years, the Google Self Driving Car project (part of Autonomous Cars) has been making and putting driverless cars on the roads ready to test. Self driving cars will not be better for people because driverless cars can put most of their expenses, businesses, privacy …show more content…
In discussions of self driving cars, controversial issues have been the loss of money and businesses. Chuck Tannert from Fast Company asks, “But will the people who need the technology the most ever be able to afford it? Not anytime soon.” (Tannert). This question is asking, will the people who need the new technology (like businessmen or scientists that can create new tests and make profits for businesses) ever be able to afford it. The answer is no because these new cars will be very expensive and people will not be able to afford it for a long time. Catey Hill from Marketwatch states that “some experts say that driverless cars could-at-least one day- accelerate the contraction of this already weakened [driver’s ed.] industry” (Hill). Catey explains that industries, like driver’s ed. are already losing money and will be out of business very quickly because of the declining numbers of students signing up for the classes. Which leads to decreasing paychecks for the industry and then the industry will eventually be forced to shut down because of expenses. Self driving cars will not help humankind, with businesses closing and the new cars being too much money for average people to afford. Overall, this will not help people or society in …show more content…
Safety is the number one priority in any situation, and companies with self driving cars are not putting that first. Srikanth Saripalli from Scientific American disagrees with Claudia Thompson when he states that “there are two main causes for crashes involving autonomous vehicles. The first source of problems is when the sensors don’t detect what’s happening around the vehicle [and] the second major problem happens when the vehicle encounters a situation that the people who wrote its software didn’t plan for-like having a truck driver not see the shuttle and back up into it.” (Saripalli). This quote demonstrates that the new driverless cars still have problems they have to fix with the sensors detecting movement around them. Before any company puts self driving vehicles on the market, they must program it correctly and test drive it through numerous situations/problems before any customers get hurt. Samuel Gibbs from The Guardian informs the readers that “it took less than two hours for Las Vegas’s brand new self driving shuttle to end up in a crash on Wednesday” (Gibbs). These two quotes show that self driving cars are obviously not ready for road interactions. In Gibbs quote he describes a crash that happened just two hours after the launch of the new self driving shuttle in Las Vegas. Luckily there was no one hurt and no property damaged. But this should
Self-driving cars should not replace human drivers because the cars will take away many jobs, other businesses will have to adapt to their existence, and they can not be always reliable without the proper maintenance. To begin, the first reason self-driving cars should not replace human drivers is because they will take away many jobs. The existing ways of vehicular transportation will be rudely interrupted as the self-driving cars take away jobs for taxi drivers, bus drivers, delivery services and postal services. In Sam Tracy’s article “Autonomous Vehicles Will
Self driving cars are not a good idea because they cause people to be lazy. This means that with self driving cars, your license wouldn’t mean a lot. To put it in another way, the drivers wouldn’t really depend on their license due to the self-driving car. So when you get pulled over by the police, you get a ticket for something the car did.
Major incumbent companies expect that the autonomous driving systems will be ready for the market in five years. This may be optimistic, but by 2050, cars that drive themselves could well be major production units for companies like General Motors. GM first revealed in 2010 that it had been working on self-driving cars[1]. Last year, GM demonstrated that the prototypes can follow the pace of traffic, while allowing the driver to have his hands off the steering wheel.
Companies like Google, Tesla and Nissan, among others, have announced over the past few years that their companies are trying to develop self-driving or autonomous cars [Ref. 1 and 2]. Self-driving cars can provide many benefits to the average consumer. Studies have shown that because computers can react and process information many times faster than a human being, crashes on streets and roads can be decreased with quick and consistent evasion maneuvers by the autonomous car. They can also help maximize fuel economy by calculating the most direct and fastest routes. When the driving of an autonomous car demonstrates that the computer can safely and reliably transport the passengers to their destination, this frees up the passengers to do other things that they would not normally be able to do if they were driving the car manually. For this reason, self-driving cars can help maximize productivity of their passengers.
It might be hard to see where the self-driving car could have issues with safety but an interesting question arises when an accident is unavoidable. The question posed is “How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random?” (ArXiv). This is a very interesting question surrounding ethics. I’m not sure if there is a right answer to the question, which could stall the self-driving car industry. Before self-driving cars are mass produced a solution needs to be found to the question about unavoidable accidents. Although this question is a problem, there may not be a need to address the problem. It is said that “"driver error is believed to be the main reason behind over 90 percent of all crashes" with drunk driving, distracted drivers, failure to remain in one lane and falling to yield the right of way the main causes.” (Keating). Self-driving cars could eliminate those problems entirely and maybe with all cars on the road being self-driving cars, there would be no “unavoidable accidents”. Safety is the main issue the self-driving car is trying to solve in transportation and seems to do a good job at
Self-driving cars should not be produced because the technical part is not 100% figured out. In source #1 paragraph 23, it says “Computers develop glitches… could be deadly when it happens at 75 miles per hour on the freeway.” This is important because being in an accident on a freeway could lead to deadly injuries. When you might have been able to prevent that, when you were the driver. The self-driving car is what caused your injury so not having control could be a fatal technical
Not long ago, when people talking about self-driving cars, most of them would feel that is far away from us. But today, we can see from news that many IT companies are already created their own self-driving technologies. Self-driving cars can use a variety of technologies, like GPS, radar, computer version, to avoid obstacle and explore surrounding environments. In order to drive safely, self-driving technologies include drifting warning, blind-spot detectors, enhanced cruise control and self-parking. The first self-driving technologies can be traced from 1980s, with Carnegie Mellon University in 1984. At present, companies which are developing self-driving cars include Apple, Google, Facebook, Uber, Volvo, Ford, Tesla, Baidu. Why do so many top companies want to develop self-driving
Self-driving cars are the wave of the future. There is much debate regarding the impact a self-driving car will have on our society and economy. Some experts believe fully autonomous vehicles will be on the road in the next 5-10 years (Anderson). This means a vehicle will be able to drive on the road without a driver or any passengers. Like any groundbreaking technology, there is a fear of the unforeseen problems. Therefore, there will need to be extensive testing before anyone can feel safe with a vehicle of this style on the road. It will also take time for this type of technology to become financially accessible to the masses, but again alike any technology with time it should be possible. Once the safety concern has been fully addressed
Technology is evolving faster than ever these days, however there is one technology that could revolutionize the transportation industry. This technology is called autonomous cars, also known as self-driving cars. Autonomous cars can be defined as a vehicle that is capable of sensing its environment, and navigating without human input. Using different techniques such as GPS and radar, autonomous cars can detect surroundings, thus removing the human element in driving. This would have a positive effect in more ways than we could ever imagine. Research suggests that self-driving cars will become more abundant in the future because they will be more cost-effective, enhance safety, and decrease traffic congestion.
After reading the article I have concluded that the idea of self-driving cars sounds more so than ever like a plausible reality rather than another eccentric sci-fi topic. Aside from morality and subjective perceptions on the practice of self-driving cars I believe that the most major problem would the financial effect self-driving cars can have on America's financial infrastructure. The implementation of self-driving cars would almost quickly eliminate millions of jobs that would be made obsolete, unemployment rates would rise exponentially but that's not where the obstacles stop. Although this was not mentioned on the cons list it was hinted at. Self-driving cars have little to no security measures so that begs to question as to how software developers will combat hackers and software
The engineering that goes into a driverless car covers all areas of mechanics, computing software and so on which still tends to frighten some drivers of its monstrosity on the inside. In the article “Google Cars Becoming Safer: Let the Robots Drive” it states that, “The economic lift from ridding the roads of human-driven vehicles would be over $190 billion per year. That would primarily come from reducing property damage caused by low-speed collisions”(Salkever). The point is that when driverless cars hit the road the cost of low-speed collision and save consumers money will be reduced. In the article “ Google Driverless Cars Run Into Problem: Cars With Drivers” Slakever states that “One Google car, in a test in 2009, couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage — paralyzing Google’s robot”(Bosker). Current drivers have never followed the rule of the road, which have made the road more prone to any accident. Drivers have found the upper hand on not following traffic laws that makes manufacturing driverless car more meticulous to decrease accidents and breaking traffic laws. The fact that driverless car sensors can detect the errors of other human driven car is extraordinary. Human driven cars are trying to stick to the status quo of the roads when in reality human driven cars are breaking valuable innovation that will make the roads safe for generations to
Throughout the last couple of years the whole world has been introduced to the new topic of self driving cars. Once being a little kid I have always dreamt of self driving automobiles and now, Car companies are saying that the cars could possibly be released into the public as soon as 2020. This will make dreams become a reality as self driving cars will soon take over. Soon everyone will be riding in they're very own self driving car. The future is here, self driving cars have taken over the topic of discusstion, there are many things good and bad that can come from self driving cars.
The future is coming but humans aren't ready for it. Recently there has been talk of self-driving cars and that they should replace humans. Self driving cars are thought to be a good replacement because they will reduce the number of accidents. However, self driving cars should not replace human drivers because they don't know how to handle normal everyday occurrences, they will increase the unemployment rate, and they will have a negative impact on humans mentally.
It said that bus, taxi, and truck drivers could all be affected.” If this happens it will make it more difficult to find work for professional drivers. Self-driving cars can be helpful for the people that can’t drive themselves due to disabilities. The age group that would be interested in this would be someone that hates public transportation or needs to make multiple trips to different locations each day. This would also give them the right to freedom to travel to places that they were normally restricted to go their due to limited travel.
Today’s cars can already come with several self driving features. Automated features in cars are becoming quite normal, some of which features include automatic opening trunk with sensoring technology, lane centering, self parking, and blind spot detection. The technology enables a car to be safer because the car can “see” it’s surroundings (Shelley, 2013). These features have been installed in cars for about a decade now and the costs of the features are decreasing every year. Self driving cars are circulating all over the world, Tesla for example has been on the rise in 2017 because they have become more affordable.