Robots prove valuable, which is terrible for humans, as robots are replacing humans in many sectors. This is not only limited to stationery machines now, and we now have self-driving cars too. A combination of sensors and software installed in the vehicle controls it, navigating and driving the vehicle with a human behind the wheel.
With just a press of a button, you can now literally call your car from its parking spot or park it without even sitting in the driving seat. Not only that, if you are traveling long distances in your self-driving car, you can set it on self-drive mode on the highway and stretch your legs out and relax. But here comes the real question. Is it safe to sit in self-driving cars?
Self-Driving Cars
According to statistics and car-crash tests by car companies, self-driving cars crash about 1/3 of the time. Usually, analysts think that self-driving cars will someday put an end to crashes. But it is not that simple because it cannot detect a simple thing like a pothole. Therefore, you cannot wholly trust a machine with your life.
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety(IIHS) is a United States nonprofit organization. It works to reduce the number of vehicle accidents. It conducts research and gives a rating for popular vehicle companies. To calculate the number of crashes due to lack of human attention and to see more crashes caused by humans or AI, researchers at IIHS went through more than 4,000 police-reported collisions from a vehicle crash survey. They separated these crashes into a few categories:
– Intoxicated Driver
– When The Driver Misinterpreted Traffic
– Distracted Driver
– Driving Too Fast Or Slow, According To A Road
It turned out that humans cause more accidents than self-driven cars. Here are a few positives and negatives about self-driven vehicles.
Positive Side
- Parking becomes easy.
- Old age people who cannot drive can use these vehicles to go to places.
- Accidents occur way less, as set algorithms and sensors in the car detect problems.
- Causes fewer traffic jams, as it has certain features which allow the vehicle to brake and accelerate simultaneously.
The Flip Side
- They are very expensive.
- Safety concerns, because no matter how high-tech it is, it is nothing but a machine created by humans. Nobody knows when there might be a technical glitch in the vehicle.
- Can be hacked. As these high-tech vehicles need your basic information to work, it stores your data, which can be easily hacked.
- Sensor failures are the most common reason that causes accidents in self-driven cars. It often happens during bad weather, like heavy rainfall or snowfall.
Conclusion
We are at a stage of innovation, where we have to be careful as to what we trust and what we don’t. When we speak about brands like Tesla, we can say that Tesla has proven to be successful in almost all car crash tests, and even the company itself guarantees safety. But at the end of the day, we are the ones that’ll decide the future of self-driving cars in this world.
According to surveys and research, it is too early to say whether these vehicles are a success or not. So far, it is undetermined whether they eliminate car crashes or contribute to them.
