Essay On Autonomous Driving

Nowadays, we are going everywhere. We are always moving and the thing we use to do that is our vehicles. We go to school, to work. We use them for fun and we use them for work. But with the our expansion of our technological abilities, we may not need to drive anymore, the technology can do that for us. The growth of autonomous driving will become the future of driving because it is safer, less work for humans, and driving has generally stayed the same and it is time for a change. Autonomous driving is when the vehicle is able to sense its surrounding environment and perform all the necessary tasks of driving. Examples of this would be changing lanes, stopping at a stoplight, yielding to emergency services, parking in a parking spot etc.

There are 6 levels of automation that range from 0-6(Lingerman). Level 0 is no automation. The driver has to be in full control, but the vehicle can have some warning systems such as reverse cameras. Level 1 is partial automation. The driver still needs to be in full control of basic driving like acceleration/deceleration and changing lanes, but now the car has the ability to sense the environment. A use of this would be radar cruise control. Level 2 automation is when the driver still needs to control the basic driving maneuvers, but now the car has some ability to accelerate/decelerate and turn the wheel. A great example of this are Ford vehicles that have the ability to parallel park on their own. After Level 2 automation, the autonomous driving starts to get more involved and can do more difficult tasks. Level 2 is more human intervention and Level 3 and up is more vehicle intervention. Level 3, conditional driving, is where the vehicle can perform tasks such as lane changes, steering, acceleration/deceleration. The human still needs to be alert so if the vehicle messes up, the human is still

If we were to reduce the pollution and the unnecessary energy usage, that would help the environment. Cars are one of the most expensive things that we as humans own but yet, they spend over 90% of their time idling and wasting fuel (From). This is a huge waste of our natural resources. Complete autonomy of vehicles could save 5.5 billion dollars and 2.9 billion gallons in a year (Knight). Complete autonomy could also allow for four times the amount of vehicles on the road (From). Yes, this does seem like an oxymoron but having denser packed roads would allow for more usage of the road and less unused space. Yes there can be an increase of the amount of vehicles by four times but there can also be a decrease in the amount of cars by 30% because if we were to fill our cars all the way instead of wasting