For those of you who aren’t regular followers of my blog, I have published a post on some of the issues I can see will need to be solved for self-driving cars being on our roads a reality. I mentioned at the end of the post that I was in favour of self-driving cars, as I believed that the pro’s outweighed the cons. In this post, I want to give possible solutions to some of the issues I outlined, as well as listing some of the pros for self-driving cars.

The UK government recently announced it would have a convoy of self-driving lorries on the road by the December 2018. Whilst I am in favour of the idea of driverless lorries, there is definitely a better way of implementing this. Whilst I assume that all of the lorries will have sensors to avoid collisions, the first lorry setting the speed isn’t the best way to go about this. I feel a better way to go about it is to have a number of lorries on the road, as was outlined, but for them to be separate entities. Therefore, the lorries will not rely on each other at all, and it is more realistic for when self-driving cars become a reality.

Another issue highlighted is the no-win situation where for example, a pedestrian will always be hit, no matter the evasive manoeuvres taken. One thing which is covered by Theory Tests (at least in the UK) is the braking distance of the cars. There are two factors for this total braking distance: the human reaction time and the actual time for the car to brake. The human reaction time would be almost zero if the human was to be replaced by a computer, meaning the total brake distance is reduced considerably. This, combined with a solution such as more paranoid reactions to people standing too close to the side of the road, would NOT lead to a solution to the no-win situation. However, it would lead to fewer accidents. If you were to put a human in the same no-win situation as the car, the outcome would be very similar, only that the car is more likely to get out of it.

When cars were first introduced, there was a percentage of the population that said that they wouldn’t get in a car. The same thing also happened with planes, and to this day there are still nervous fliers. There will always be people who aren’t comfortable with change, understandably. A change this big revolutionises the roads in a big way. However, if there was a statistical comparison between the humans and driverless cars, and there was a big difference in favour of the driverless cars, I think more would be convinced to try them.

Personally, I can see three major benefits to driverless cars. The first two benefits concern the driver’s safety.

The first benefit is the safety of the drivers whilst driving. On all roads, especially motorways, there are (insert not so nice word) who constantly cut people up, jump red lights and pull out in front of others. Whether their reasoning is ‘I was late’, tiredness, not paying attention, or some alternative reason, self-driving cars would not suffer from these issues.

The second benefit concerns professional drivers (ie taxi drivers and lorry drivers) and their long term health. They rack up millions of miles and are constantly sat driving for hours on end cannot possibly be healthy. Vision impairments will be the least of their worries! Back and neck injuries, exposure to hazardous chemicals and stress have all been linked to full-time driving. One study on this can be found here.

The third benefit I have thought about is the safety of cars on the road. If a law was passed that all driverless cars have to share the location with the driverless cars in the area, this would cause them to be much safer. This would give them two ways of detecting oncoming traffic and pedestrians and such. The first is through the use of cameras, and the second is this localisation system. There is the issue of data protection with this, which would need to be thought about in some detail before being implemented.

As you can see, there are a number of pros for self-driving cars. I feel that as long as the issues are addressed properly, the self-driving cars will be a valuable addition to the roads. In turn, this will make the roads safer and the population healthier.

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