Let us face it. Humans are terrible drivers. Traffic-related accidents kill around 1.5 million people a year worldwide. If you are from Delhi like me, you would dread getting in the car during peak hours. All this is about to change with self-driving cars. Yes, you would be able to text, doze and drink while in the car.

While there has been quite a buzz around Google and Tesla’s self-driving cars recently, there has always been a fantastic sci-fi element about cars zipping on the roads without a driver. Let us understand what is happening and what does the future hold for autonomous cars.

History

Sci-fi authors have been telling stories about vehicles that do not need a driver and even fly for hundreds of years. But realistic experiments began only in the 1920s. In the 1950s, the experiments seem to be going somewhere with trials happening. Then in the 1980s, real progress was made when Carnegie Mellon University and Mercedes-Benz along with Bundeswehr University Munich showcased working prototypes of self-driving cars. This encouraged the industry and today almost every automobile or tech company worth its salt is experimenting and researching in this field including Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, Audi, Nissan, Volvo, Bosch, Tesla Motors, University of Parma, Oxford University and Google. The countries that are planning to operate self-driving cars based transport systems include U.K, France, Italy and Belgium while Germany, Spain and Netherlands have already allowed testing robotic cars in real conditions. In the U.S., there have been extensive testing and trials going on in a few states.

Advantages

  • Eliminate human error element thus reducing accidents
  • Safety on the roads and better flow of traffic
  • Since the car is driven by a computer, it does not matter if the occupant is blind, intoxicated, under age or distracted
  • The Earth Institute has forecasted the reduction of U.S.’ fleet of vehicles by a factor of 10

Major hurdles

Critics say that there are hundreds of driving decisions that need to be made which work because of human judgment. The computer might not be able to sense how other human drivers will behave and drive. Things might improve when all vehicles get computer-driven until then self-driving cars will have to be on the roads with humans behind the steering wheels.

Of course, there are many regulatory hurdles which will take a long time to clear. Just a few hours ago, it was reported that U.S. vehicle safety regulators are prepared to interpret the artificial intelligence system as ’driver’ in the context of self-driven cars in place of traditional ‘human’ drivers. This is a major step toward getting the regulators approve the autonomous vehicles on the roads.

There is also the issue of cost and affordability. All the sensors, GPS array, the computer system will bring the cost up to US$300,000. As the adaptation will grow, this might come down, though.

It is safe to say that it will be at least another 10 years before we see a mass usage of self-driving cars.

Future

Now that self-driving cars are real and there have been proofs that they could be used for mass usage, it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ will we see self-driving cars up for sale. According to some studies, by 2025, there could be 200,000 to 250,000 self-driving cars worldwide. The annual sales of such cars are predicted to jump to 11.8 million by 2035. Which means a cumulative total of a staggering 54 million cars on the road by 2035.

The poster boy of automobile technology, Elon Musk says usage of autonomous cars will become as normal as using an elevator. Remember how there used to be an operator in earlier elevators? But now you just press a button.

I really love the fact that the cars will have wider learning capabilities which mean that cars will not just learn from themselves but from other cars on the road too. Imagine the collective driving experience these cars will have.

Suddenly the drive motorway 1 during peak hours does not sound too scary.