Driving or No Driving?

In time of the world there has been talk about driverless cars. People tend to want and have a driverless car while others are against the driverless cars. Some believe driverless cars will be a great opportunity for the world. There can be a chance of less car accidents, more of following the law, and not having to worry about looking on the road but instead doing something else while the car drives for you. Others who are against driverless cars believe there can be technology issues. If something may be wrong with the car and need repairs, the car may not function properly. People also worry that people who own driverless cars will grow dependant. But the question is, what are self-driving cars and how do they work? Are they trustworthy?

Self-driving cars is a vehicle that doesn’t need a person holding onto the wheel or gas to run. There are different levels of how self-driving cars can be. Level 1 self-driving cars need assistance from the driver just with braking, steering, and accelerating. Level 5 self driving cars is fully able to do everything by itself, whether that’s braking, driving, steering, you name it. Level 5 is being highly tested by Tesla. But how do the cars see danger and sense what’s wrong for them to not even be dependent on a human? The answer is simple. Radars, lidars, and cameras (Vanderbilt). The three sensors. A radar has been used lots of times for vehicles for cruise control and automatic emergency braking. Radars are useful for self-driving cars because they’re able to set it on cruise once going the speed limit and can trigger the emergency braking without needing a human to do so (Solon). An example of this is if you are about to hit a person crossing the street, radar will sense that and trigger the brakes. Radars are able to do this by sending radio waves that bounce off of surfaces. Lidar is a little similar but different from a radar because instead of sending radio waves, lidar uses laser lights to see around the area. It creates models that appear around the car. Lidar is also able to see further than a radar which is good for long distance. Lastly, the best use is a camera. With cameras high quality lets there provide more sight than the lidar and radar together, cameras are able to get the best view of the surroundings around the car.

However, even with all the technology to be dependent on the self-driving, there are limitations to the technology’s that are in the self-driving cars. While the three sensors are good use, there are limitations to them which are the downsides. The downside to a radar is that the technology can’t see detail and puts the picture in low quality. This results in sometimes not being able to fully be aware of the surroundings on what’s around the vehicle because it’s not able to pick up objects. This can end up in having a car accident because it’s not able to pick up something. A human could possibly run something over, or ruin their car (Solon). Disadvantages in lidar are weather conditions and requires more parts for it to run which can lead to more possibilities of function failing. The weather conditions effect lidar because it can’t work in fog or dust. So depending on what the weather is, the lidar may struggle and being dependent on a self-driving car can affect your driving skills with this. Lastly, the camera too has downsides, which follow not being able to work well in weather, and taking computer measurements to be accurate to the distance of something, and sometimes that measurement may not be accurate and can still cause an accident. While self-driving may be relaxing and dependant, not having to drive, there can be technology malfunctions and can cause serious accidents still.

Self-driving cars are being brought into our world today to ideally have people be safer on the roads, causing less accidents, less deaths. Improving the safety of driving out is why these self-driving cars are being introduced into the world. If a self-driving car is well put together then there won’t be accidents that happen and can prevent from killing someone (Solon). Self-driving cars also lead to opportunities to let seniors and people with disadvantages to be on the road and get to places without having to be dependent on someone driving them to where they’d like to be. Another final reasoning that doesn’t involve benefiting people is that self-driving cars are wanted around because of the carbon being lowered into our skies. Self-driving cars run on electric or other energy so they’ll be less consuming carbon and releasing it into our skies. People believe not only having self-driving cars will be beneficial to people, but also to the Earth.

In conclusion, with self-driving cars trying to be put and more into use with today’s world there are its disadvantages and advantages people are able to get out of the car. With our society changing and adapting, developing companies prioritize keeping up with the people in order to improve change and make money into the world. Self-driving cars comes with change and testing the limits of the vehicle is always important to assure safety of others.

“tesla car” by Drakh is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.