Driverless Car: Berlin

Researchers at Free University in Berlin have been experimenting with a driverless car. The driverless car is similar to Google’s Toyota Prius and has been driving around without completely by computer. The car can sense the road, people, buildings and trees up to 200 feet. As would be expected the car has a faster reaction time than that of a human being’s. The car costs around $552,000. I doubt this car will be on show room floors any time soon.
 
Experts claim driverless cars should be available in the next 10-40 years. This is probably a good estimate with the better estimate being the 40 years. The problem I see in developing driverless cars is ensuring quality on each one. Google and the researchers at Free University have made one of these cars, but once you start creating a thousand of anything it leads to quality control problems. As long as manufactures can prove the cars are safer than the human alternative I think people will buy them. Although, people will be reluctant at first to buy a machine that they can’t control. However, one could make the argument that air travel is done by auto pilot which essentially is a computer operating at 30,000 feet above the ground. The number of fatalities today is around where it was in the 1950’s. This is incredible given we have exponentially more drivers. A better measure is looking at highway deaths per miles driven which has dramatically decreased since 1921. Driverless cars in time will make us safer. The people most likely to buy the first cars will be people who have money, who don’t like driving, are bad at driving, or are prone to accidents. Taxi cabs would be put out of a business if a driverless car could pick up and drop off people.

The main argument for driverless cars I see as I mentioned in an earlier post is the amount of time that would be freed up to do other things. This alone would increase GDP, allow us to get more sleep, more fuel efficient cars, and give people even more leisure time. Driverless cars if proven safe would drive down the cost of insurance. We could even get to a day where cars do errands for people! Imagine if you could send a car to the store and the car could pick up groceries or go to Best Buy to buy something. I am imagining lines where store employees load cars and the car then drives back home to its owner.

The $550,000 cost of the current car will decrease over time. During the early stages of any new technology the cost is very high because very few people are doing it. However, once other competitors enter into the market the price will drop making everyone better off (once they finally decide to release a commercial version). Something tells me the price would have to be less than $100,000 for anyone to actually buy one. Time will only tell if or when this even happens. The future can’t be predicted no matter what the past shows because there are technologies just waiting to be discovered.

Driverless Cars: Part Deux

Recently the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles to adopt autonomous cars. Wait if we have driverless cars do we really need the DMV? One can only dream. Even as free market as I am, I still think you need rules in the early stages of driverless cars. Google has test driven some of these cars already and before long these cars will only get more experience. One thing people forget is that the longer technology has been out there it will only get better through innovation and by trial and error. The first cars will of course not be perfect. I don’t doubt people might get hurt or could possibly die in the first edition of these kinds of cars. The question will be however will driverless cars be safer than an ordinary human driver? I think the answer is: In time yes driverless cars will be safer than human drivers. Humans are incredibly smart creatures and even robots can’t capture all of our intelligence. However, robots are very good at repeated tasks and doing things much more precisely than humans.

My theory is that driverless cars will not happen over-night, but however be a gradual process. The first stage might be to have the driverless cars with some human assistance. Gradually though the amount of human intervention needed would decrease as cars become smarter and safer. These driverless cars could serve as taxi-cabs if they were truly driverless. Another application might be to have the cars do errands for people. One example could be the car could drive itself to the grocery store and pick up items. The car could park in some type of lane and a clerk from the store could load the food into the car. This sounds like a neat idea but even I know its decades away.

The legislation in Nevada about driverless cars is a step in the right direction. In a earlier blog I went into more detail about the possible benefits from driverless cars and still feel as if they would benefit society immensely.