The self-driving car is something that has appeared in sci-fi fare for many decades. However, self-driving vehicles are gradually making their way out of cartoons and comic books and infiltrating our reality. You might not have seen any self-driving cars yet, but theyβre coming.
Letβs look at where the automotive industry is with self-driving cars and how soon you might expect to see one on the road next to you or even in your driveway.
Why Do We Want Self-Driving Vehicles?
You might wonder why we even need self-driving cars. Donβt humans do a good enough job driving ourselves around?
The answer is no, as it turns out. Truck accidents are just one of the areas we can look at when we ask why we need self-driving vehicles. From 2009 to 2017, the United States sawΒ a 40% fatal truck accident increase.Β Β
When a truck accident occurs, it can be deadly. You have an enormous, multiple-ton vehicle thatβs fully capable of taking out multiple other cars on the road in an instant under the right circumstances. Maybe you have a driver who falls asleep behind the wheel, or perhaps theyβre drunk or high.
Weβre not doing a whole lot better with car accidents, either. They happen frequently, and more times than not, human error is the cause.
Drivers seem all too eager to text on their phones while they should be paying attention to the road ahead of them. Then you have those who try to put ketchup on their fries while zooming down the highway at eighty miles per hour.
The list of bad driver behaviors seems endless. Self-driving vehicles could stop all that from happening. But do we want to turn vehicular control over to artificial intelligence?
How Will Self-Driving Cars Work?
The automotive industry sometimes refers to self-driving cars as βautonomous cars.β An autonomous vehicle, when itβs available, will run on a machine learning system. It will also utilize complex algorithms, actuators, and sensors to indicate whatβs around it at any moment.
All of that sounds pretty complicated, but hereβs the biggest takeaway: autonomous car creators arenβt going to let these vehicles onto the roads until theyβve tested them extensively. They donβt want any of these vehicles going haywire and plowing into a crowd of pedestrians.
Automakers knowΒ the lawsuitsΒ they would run into, and even though theyβre all competing with each other, theyβre not jumping the gun on making this technology widely available.
Autonomous cars will map their surroundings as they drive. They will have sensors located all over the vehicle. However, you should understand that as time passes, there are also going to be more sensors elsewhere as well.
IoT, or the βinternet of things,β will help self-driving cars. IoT involves having sensors embedded everywhere, such as underneath city streets, in mailboxes, traffic lights, etc. It creates a real-time working grid with which the self-driving cars will be able to interact.
Traffic Pattern Predictions
Because these cars will be able to communicate with sensors all around them, theyβll identify and predict traffic patterns. Theyβll use radar sensors to detect vehicles in other lanes. They will use video cameras to βseeβ pedestrians, traffic lights, road signs, and so forth.
In other words, when this technology arrives, youβll have a car thatβs communicating with and receiving data from receptors all around it. Self-driving cars, when we have this widespread technology, wonβt just be about the vehicles themselves. There will be thousands upon thousands of data points all over the streets with which the cars will interact.
What About in the Country?
You might wonder about rural areas at this point. If the cars need all of these other external sources to navigate busy city streets, what happens when youβre out on a country road where there are no sensors or cameras?
Car manufacturers are not going to allow any self-driving cars to hit the streets until they know these vehicles can get along okay in any traffic situation. By the time the carmakers give the public access, theyβll haveΒ the algorithmsΒ and hard-coded rules in place that will guarantee smooth driving. The car should so fine even when itβs away from the urban centers where it can interact with IoT technology as it drives.
How Far Away is This Technology?
As for when you can expect to see these vehicles on the road, several companies are testing both cars for eventual widespread sale and also trucks for hauling. Youβll likely see self-driving trucks before you can buy a self-driving car.
Car companies usually refer to completely self-driving cars as βLevel 5β vehicles. This means full autonomy, and weβre probably still several years away.
Several challenges face these vehicles before the manufacturers deem them safe enough for us to buy. There are environmental, philosophical, legislative, and technological issues with which the makers must contend.
For instance, think about weather conditions. A self-driving car might do fine when thereβs ideal weather, but will it work as well when thereβs a deluge?
How might such a vehicle do in bumper-to-bumper traffic, or on bridges, or in tunnels? If there is an accident, who’s liable? The human passenger, or would it be the manufacturer?
Then, there are emotional versusΒ artificial intelligenceΒ issues. For example, if two cars come to a four-way stop at the same time, one driver might indicate to another with a hand gesture or eye contact who should go first. How will two self-driving cars figure that out?
There arenβt easy answers to any of these questions. Thatβs why, while we canβt say for sure that youβll see self-driving cars in three years, or five, or ten, we can definitely say that itβs still going to be a while. No manufacturer will allow the general public access until theyβre quite certain theyβve gotten past all these issues. For now, we have to be patient, knowing that these vehicles are on their way, but weβll have to keep driving ourselves for now.