The Pros And Cons Of Autonomous Vehicles

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The technologies have improved a lot over the past decades. From smartphones to laptops, the technologies are limitless. There is a new vehicle technology called self-driving car which allows the car to pilot for you on the road. It works by making the vehicle operates itself without human control. According to Alan Amici, a vice president of automotive engineering at TE, “Recent NHTSA research shows that approximately 94 percent of accidents are caused by human error” (Gupton). He believes that the self-regulating cars with advanced safety features could reduce the amount of collisions. It’s safety features include connectivity which the cars have access to the surroundings of the car like weather, infrastructure, etc. Those factors are being …show more content…

The legislation in several states are trying to pass the policy to make the lives of drivers on roads with autonomous drivers safer. The states such as: Nevada, “Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Vermont—and Washington D.C” has passed legislation that related to autonomous vehicles (“Autonomous Vehicles | Self-Driving Vehicles Enacted Legislation). As explained before, those states are trying to make the roads a lot safer with autonomous drivers. Eventually, the governers in “Arizona, Delaware, Massachusetts, Washington and Wisconsin issued executive orders related to autonomous vehicles” (“Autonomous Vehicles | Self-Driving Vehicles Enacted Legislation, 2017). There is a figure 1 that shows the states passing the legislation relating to autonomous …show more content…

Only people can drive the autonomous car when they have a license, steering wheel, specially-trained operator to take over immediate control and “$5-million insurance bond” (Hiltzik, 2016). Those regulations are being placed on testing cars, so it would be illegal for them to drive on public roads without having drivers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration classifies the autonomous cars by the levels. By levels, it means that there are different level of cars depending on how well the cars drive on their own without human intervention. This agency wanted to move to level 3 which allows the car to drive by itself efficiently, while having a smooth transition when transferring the control to humans. There is a case where Volvo decided to skip from level 2 to level 4 which makes the autonomous cars not use any driver input aside from setting a destination. According to the experiments conducted from Virginia Tech, the drivers with level 3 car has an “average of 17 seconds to respond to takeover requests. In that period, a vehicle going 65 m.ph. would have traveled 1,621 feet – more than five football fields” (Quain, 2016). However, it is too soon for them to make the cars too autonomous due to people’s slower reaction time on level 3

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