Autonomous vehicles – or driverless cars – were originally marketed as vehicles created and built to ensure general road safety, and the well-being of other drivers on the road. And though a driverless truck trundling along a busy thoroughfare may seem to exist as an unparalleled sight as of 2017, developers and researchers have promised it will likely become the norm within the next 15 years.
This has not been a road newly traveled; reports have proven that the concept of autonomous vehicles has been in the works since the 1970s. This would mean that the driverless delivery trucks and vans we witness today have spent nearly half a century in the development and production stage!
Driverless vehicles boast advanced technology; this technology has the reckonable ability to communicate efficiently with other vehicles on the road. All traveling occupants on a given road will benefit from reduced traffic congestion, due to the fact that a driverless truck's smart AI (artificial intelligence) would be able to swiftly calculate and weigh the smoothest, most efficient routes and driving decisions to take. Regardless of which car you may be driving, driverless vehicles have been programmed and built to make on-road decisions that will save your time and fuel, and keep the traffic moving along.
Autonomous vehicles are not restricted to self-driving cars alone; in fact, newer models of commercially-marketed vehicles now boast semi-autonomous features. In fact, BMW's i3 electric car parks itself, and holds the capacity to pick you – the driver – up from the spot where you were originally dropped off.
Such autonomous vehicles also carry complex algorithms which allow them to pick up and detect moving objects on the road. This may essentially mean that a large, driverless truck has the capacity to immediately halt if a harmless cat crosses the street. However, the rate of working efficiency of such algorithms dropped by nearly 5% in 2016; this means that driverless vehicles might still pose a risk to human drivers and road-crossing pedestrians. As such, if you have been involved in an accident with a driverless vehicle, and have sustained property damage or injuries, professionals at Gruber Law explain exactly the implications of being in an accident caused by a self-driving car.
According to recent statistics, 94% of all current road accidents are a result of human error; the developers behind driverless vehicles are working to narrow that number by introducing more autonomous vehicles on the road in order to avoid such disastrous accidents from occurring.
Furthermore, a vast majority of autonomous vehicles now carry environmentally-friendly features: reduced, efficient cylinder sizes, and alternative fuel options dramatically reduce the devastatingly-large carbon footprint that vehicles usually produce.
Though autonomous cars arguably place a lot of people out of work, they also assist in creating new jobs in terms of developing, manufacturing, and assembling the cars of the future.