Within the next decade, driverless cars could be on highways all over the world thanks to tremendous technological advancements that many automakers and safety experts believe will make driverless cars far safer than cars with drivers.
Yes, you read that right. Driverless cars will be safer than cars with drivers, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) safety research expert John Maddox told USA Today in an article entitled “Google discloses costs of its driverless car tests.”
Maddox said human error is the "critical reason" for 93 percent of car accidents and he expects driverless cars to save the lives of tens of thousands of Americans annually. In 2012, 34,080 Americans died in automobile accidents. That total is much lower than the more than 50,000 per year that were killed on the nation’s roads during the 1960s and 1970s, but Maddox said he expects driverless cars to reduce the death toll more dramatically than significant car safety improvements such as seatbelts and airbags.
You’re probably thinking that Maddox is insane because driverless cars will be way too expensive even if they were technologically possible. You’re probably thinking that practical, driverless cars belong in science fiction movies or cartoons.
Yet, numerous automobile companies are so confident in the technology that they are testing driverless cars and have exhibited them at trade shows such as the 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The technology is improving by leaps and bounds. In 2013, the equipment that was needed to make cars drive by themselves filled the trunk of a car. In 2014, the same technology fit inside a car’s glove compartment.
Here is a 3-minute video of a car designed by Audi driving by itself on a highway in the Las Vegas area. There is a “driver” in the driver’s seat, but he clearly isn’t driving.
Audi's real advancement this year is the compact zFAS car computer,” according to the article posted below the video. “In the future, the Nvidia powered system could be used for key automated-driving tasks like traffic sign recognition, lane departure warnings and pedestrian spotting.”
Audi is just one of several companies that are testing driverless cars. BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes Benz, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo are among the others. Like Audi, BMW exhibited its car at the Las Vegas expo. Here is an 85-second video of the car self-driving at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
“The car uses steering, breaking and throttle to control acceleration, deceleration and direction in very small, exact amounts,” according to the article below the video of the Audi car self-driving. “The demonstration is just one aspect of the technical building blocks required to make a self-driving car. There are also sensors, environmental modeling and decision and driving strategy technologies that BMW is working on. Those were not included on this particular test vehicle.”
The key to driverless cars is technology that enables cars via cameras, global positioning system (GPS) technology, lidar (laser radar) and radar to see and sense everything on the road and to decide when to accelerate and brake and how to steer based on that information.
Currently, the technology is prohibitively expensive. Lidar technology in cars designed by Google, yes Google, costs about $70,000. Altogether, the cars have about $150,000 in equipment. Here is a 4-minute video of Google engineer Sebastian Thrun talking about a Google car, while showing it navigating city streets, highways, and roads that are going up mountains and are just a couple of feet away from the edge of a hill and a potentially dangerous plunge.
Carmakers estimate that driverless cars will be available to the general public in seven to 10 years. Interestingly, they believe that issues such as regulations and laws might be a bigger obstacle to the cars being available than the technology, which is improving so rapidly that the cost is expected to plunge.
The driverless cars might not be accepted by the public at first, but car safety experts note that car buyers right now regard car safety as an important criterion in their purchasing decisions. Thus, they will eventually be accepted, the experts say.
“Our goal should be crashless cars," Maddox said.
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