Gadgetory

you know a few things in technology right now inspire as much fascination doubt and personal indignation as self-driving cars each traffic light has to be correctly identified from the all weather and lighting conditions I didn't drive anything I was just sitting in the car amazed about how smooth and how simple it looks even though there is a lot of technology behind the car so I'm very encouraging new more precise cameras will ensure the lane-keeping aid functions perfectly this increases comfort as well as safety of course the driver can regain control over the vehicle at any point however particularly in situations like this you will increasingly wonder why he's sure we're gonna get there even sooner than we think okay the reasons for self-driving cars these largely cluster around greater good for example fewer accidents computers don't get bored they don't drink they know the rules of the road they don't get distracted by that smart phone on the seat next to them that could really eat away at the 93 percent or so of the six million annual wrecks in this country that are caused by humans screw-up then there's better Road utilization let's face it humans are pretty lousy at driving precisely keeping their cars in a very even gap and a closed gap just look at this video from an experiment recently where the drivers were asked to follow each other with an even tight gap between their cars and not really now computers at the wheel can maintain tight gaps with low elasticity as they move back and forth in conditions that means more cars on existing roadway with great safety better fuel utilization computers can be programmed to operate the accelerator and brake in a way that preserves kinetic energy rather than dumping fuel in the cylinders at one moment only to convert that speed and to brake dust and heat the next Edmonds estimates that even current cruise control can save some 14% of fuel when implemented greater productivity average American right now spends something like 200 hours a year babysitting a dumb machine from home to work and back again think what you could get done either personally or in your work if you had that time back at those times now the arguments I most often hear against self-driving cars often accompanied by a red face go along these lines first I like to drive so do I believe me but I don't like my commute I don't like minding a machine on routine journeys back and forth on the weekend you can switch your autonomous car to manual I don't trust computers this one's understandable after all we're basically talking about putting the same technology into cars that gave us the blue screen of death the sad Mac and five bars but no connection however I take quite a bit of Hope in the commercial airline industry as an example of how we can get five nines of reliability in a critical transportation mode related to that one is when computers fail they fail spectacularly humans tend to pick up on things before they get out of hand but I have to believe the software development infrastructure and redundant systems can solve this one and there's the concern that this stuff's gonna make cars cost a fortune well a lot of the building blocks are in cars affordably today look at adaptive cruise control self parking Lane drift prevention blind spot warning tech take those existing technologies give them another million lines of code or so and permission to do their thing and we might have a very safe system it's affordable already here's some milestones that you should watch with me to see how self-driving cars progressed first of all those building technologies I just mentioned look for them to become almost ubiquitous in cars of every price class then look for regulatory acceptance the way California and Nevada have recently put laws on the books saying it's okay to have an autonomous car on public roads as long as a human can catch it if it screws up car maker leadership not just salesmanship companies like Nissan Mercedes General Motors among those who said self-driving cars will start to really arrive as soon as 2020 there will be hiccups and problems on the road the key is to handle those with a public dialogue and education then there's generational change successive generations will probably see self-driving as less of a threat as less subtract tip for their lifestyle than previous generations and finally google few tech companies have the ability to create behavioral change on a global scale as google does and has bottom line is this is a win not an f' to get ready for at least a partially autonomous car in your foreseeable future