Gadgetory

I'm Brian Cooley from cnet on cars taking some of your email about high-tech cars and modern driving this one comes in from Jonathan be invalid our Germany who says his question is about the aim of self-driving cars in general is it really to be safer he says there will always be other cars that aren't automated and are being driven by humans thus exposing the rest of us in self-driving cars to the same accident risky reasons now Jonathan it's interesting question because this is often seen as an all-or-nothing position but let's really dig into it here into this idea of reducing accidents with self-driving first of all there are the inter car benefit so this is the area of cars dealing with each other and I would posit to you that getting even a fair amount of self-driving cars on the road is going to increase our safety even though we have a lot of humans still driving around those cars the self-driving car will see the human driven car around it as just another obstacle to be recognized processed and dealt with with its various machine reactions now it's not perfect of course but I don't think we need to get to an all-or-nothing fleet for self-driving cars to be extremely safe then there's also the intra car benefit how self-driving cars regardless of how they act with other cars will help us get rid of the problems we have from drunkenness distraction and just plain crappy driving technique that let's face it plague so many folks who are driving their cars right now the third area of benefit is going to be kind of the group or the hivemind benefit deep in the future when self-driving cars are talking to each other are all reporting in as a group to some kind of central control within a metropolitan area and we can really manage the cars out there as a fleet making sure every car is doing the right thing in relation to the roads and the cars and traffic conditions and flow as opposed to the kind of willy nilly haphazard driving and decisions that we make today but that's well down the road and that benefits both safety and of course efficiency