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Risks of self - driving cars
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Autonomous vehicles are the talk of rising and successful car companies, for example, Tesla, but are they really proved to be the safest way of driving as such companies claim it to be? Autonomous vehicles shouldn’t be allowed as a way of transport on the road for many reasons. First of all, autonomous vehicles, like all technology can have glitches as well as faults in its programming, second, autonomous vehicles can get hacked by exterior sources, last of all, autonomous vehicles affect not only safety but other industries. Autonomous vehicles are not only unsafe to us, humans but they can affect small auto repair business who simply run on things like accidents involving cars. To elaborate, autonomous cars aren’t glitch-free, meaning that someone could easily miss a detail in programming. Autonomous cars can only be programmed to do things to a certain extent. Companies can’t …show more content…
Auto repair companies, car insurance companies, all of these wouldn’t have anything to sell because if autonomous cars are already accident-proof, then car repairs wouldn’t be as necessary and car insurance would be useless. This could cause a domino effect, for example if autonomous cars are completely accident proof, then insurance and auto repair companies wouldn’t be needed anymore in the industry. Resulting in less income for the companies that sell tires or machine parts to those industries. Not to mention other car companies which don’t sell autonomous vehicles, no one would want regular cars when everyone would want the new and improved self-driving vehicles. All of this affects parts of the car industry and small businesses won’t be able to survive in this bustling economy of self-driving
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.
Imagine having your life flash before your eyes while you were still wearing diapers. And imagine having a hot hunk of metal crash into you and shatter your sense of everything. When I was just three years old, I was the victim of a very scary car accident. While waiting to make a turn into my nursery school, my mom’s car was rear-ended by a car driving at 50 miles per hour. I remember how incredibly loud the collision was and even how the windows seemed to shiver in their rubber holders. Seeing my mom's head fly back and feeling the car swerve into the opposing traffic, I thought I was going to die. And why did this happen? Because the person driving behind us was texting on her phone and was not focused on the road. All of this, the emotional, physical, and financial damage, and the possibility of losing my mom's or my own life, could have been prevented if the car behind us was a driverless car. Briefly, a driverless car is capable of driving itself via an intricate system of cameras, sensors and computers. I propose that human drivers should be replaced with driverless cars because driverless cars are safer and more efficient.
The goals behind self-driving cars are to decrease collisions, traffic jams and the use of gas and harmful pollutants. The autonomous automobile is able to maneuver around objects and create swift lines of cars on roadways (How Google’s self-Driving Car Works, 2011). The autonomous vehicle can react faster than humans can, meaning less accidents and the potential to save thousands of lives. Another purpose and vision for these cars is that vehicles would become a shared resource. When someone needed a car, he or she could just use his or her Smartphone and a self-sufficient car would drive up and pick him or her up.
Driverless cars were once a concept fantasied about in sci-fi movies of the future but are now becoming a reality. Computers are now being installed in automobiles so the vehicle can drive itself without human assistance. This is an incredible technological advancement that has resulted in many angles of feedback from the public. The benefits of driverless cars eliminate the inconvenience of calling a taxi when you’re intoxicated, too drowsy to operate a traditional vehicle, and also allow the elderly or impaired to remain mobile. These benefits have been met with just as many concerns.
But are they safe? On March 24 2017, an Uber autonomous car was involved with a 3 way crash in Tempe Arizona. With no serious injuries, everyone walked away with a few bruises and cuts from the Uber’s overturned car; but the accident had nothing to do with a “glitch” or a “compilation error” but instead a distracted driver trying to merge and side swiping the Autonomous suv. This and Google’s accident (One of their self driving lexus SUV’s cars drove slowly into a bus {2 mph kek}) have cast a shadow that AV (autonomous vehicles) are “unsafe” and “computers can't do what a human can” that's been dampening their reputation and slowing their development on making them safer, even though, statistically, there 70% more efficient than a human driver.
Did you know, self-driving cars are the new thing? We have come up with the technology over a few short years to produce these cars. Car companies are trying to convert these vehicles into the only ones on our roads, getting rid of manual cars. Yes, there are some pros or advantages, but the disadvantages are more life threatening. Hence, I believe the self-driving cars should not be on our roads because they are not safe.
The opponents would also against self-driving cars because of personal privacy. The obvious point is that, if you use vehicles which is entirely control by a computer, your movements are extremely easy to be tracked by the company or a third party. Operating systems could be hacked, self-driving cars also do. Self-driving cars are facing with the serious privacy
Although there are issues with implementing self-driving cars on the roads today, self-driving cars can ultimately benefit society. According to public announcements made by companies like Tesla and Nissan, we may start seeing self-driving cars on the roads within the next 3 to 6 years [Ref. 1 and 2].
Researchers with the University of Michigan Transport Research Institute have been gathering numbers and evidence from the studies. They have found that a total of 11 accidents involving self-driving cars between 2012 and September 2015, two of which resulted in injuries. With the cars having driven
There are many distracted or impaired drivers on the road which neither would be the case with a self-driving car. According to, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Alcohol impaired driving accounted for 31% of auto accident fatalities in 2013 (NTSA 3). Therefore, Self-driving vehicles would essentially eliminate or at the very least dramatically reduce this statistic, saving many lives each year. It is like having a designated driver built into your vehicle.
Google has successfully built a self-driving car, yet “Google insists on developing a car without a steering wheel partly because it contends that people often don’t pay attention while their cars are operating autonomously” (Vock 37). Even though autonomous vehicles drive themselves, passengers are still able to manually control certain features of the car. For example, the person in the vehicle “can manually control the car to go a little bit faster than the car might on its own” (Swant). Google has put much consideration on how the car drives and handles interactions at traffic signals and signs. For example, “Google has begun programming its fleet of self-driving cars to inch forward at for way stops” to make sure there are no cars before proceeding (qtd. In “Making Robot Cars More Human 1). When there are multiple cars traveling together, “computer control enables cars to drive behind one another, so they travel as a virtual unit (Fisher 60). The autonomous Google Car has proven to successfully drive on the roads with other vehicles, but the technology that is in the car is more complicated than it
In theory, the autonomous car is amazing, unfortunately the reality is far more dim. There are so many things wrong with autonomous cars, and no one wants to face the harsh reality of all the problems. Safety is the main reason people would want an autonomous car, however robots don’t learn, they have to be programmed. Most people only trust autonomous cars because of the science behind them. Believing that science can do better than humans, on the surface that can seem true.
still the driver’s fault because the cars are still level 3 and are not meant to be used without human supervision and this happens because the computer along with its software fails to recognize dangerous situations and thus prevent collisions. As the report, Self-Driving Cars: Mapping Access to a Technology Revolution suggest, “Passenger safety is reliant on software understanding the nature of threats posed by the environment. It also must be immune to harmful threats imposed by humans through the introduction of viruses or remote intervention over wireless networks” (National Council on Disability, 23). In other words, the programming of the software not only needs to be perfect imitating humans’ reaction at the moment of an emergency,
The self-driving car would cause many people to lose their jobs. The careers that would no longer be needed due to the self-driving car include but are not limited to those who drill oil, taxi drivers, and personal injury lawyers. If self-driving cars were electric, oil drillers would be needed less and a majority could lose their jobs. If there’s self-driving cars, there could easily be a self-driving taxi service. If self-driving cars reduce accidents a majority of personal injury lawyers’ business would disappear. Also the gasoline industry would suffer, affecting stockholders, and there would be no need for drivers’ education
Automotive executives touting self-driving cars as a way to make commuting more productive or relaxing may want to consider another potential marketing pitch: safety (Hirschauge, 2016). The biggest reason why these cars will make a safer world is that accident rates will enormously drop. There is a lot of bad behavior a driver exhibit behind the wheel, and a computer is actually an ideal motorist. Since 81 percent of car crashes are the result of human error, computers would take a lot of danger out of the equation entirely. Also, some of the major causes of accidents are drivers who become ill at the time of driving. Some of the examples of this would be a seizure, heart attack, diabetic reactions, fainting, and high or low blood pressure. Autonomous cars will surely remedy these types of occurrences making us