From a young age every kid watched movies that had self driving cars or flying cars, we always wondered when they would come around. Cars have evolved over the last hundred or so years. They started off with cars that had wooden wheels, then going to cars that had stick shift, then years later the automatic was invented making the the stick shift car a thing of the past. In about 2015 Elon Musk started his journey a long with many other companies to become the first to have self driving cars. Everyone was excited about the news on self driving cars but not many people took in to account the many questions and many un solved problems with self driving cars. When will every car on the road be self driving? Will it be 5 years from now or 10? Will you allow a computer to drive you and your family around? So many different questions to be answered and it seems like more news on the self driving cars come out each day.

Self driving cars seem to be the next big thing for our generation. In 2019 all of Tesla’s cars come standard with auto pilot technology. The standard self driving feature is called “Traffic-Aware Cruise Control and Auto-steer”. If you would like to Tesla does offer “Full auto pilot” this is something you have to pay extra money for and does not come standard. The thing about self driving cars is how can they make the right decision and if they can’t how often can they make the right choice.

The autonomous car mean to have the freedom to govern itself or control its own affairs. Many people dream of having a self driving car but many people have never experienced being in one. It is a totally different feeling when you are in a car with no one driving except for some algorithms and some cameras that will determine if you get to your destination safely. If all cars were self driving cars then that would make things a little bit more safer because the algorithms can be programmed from car to car but if you have self driving cars and human driven cars there are always going to be problems. A study was done in the UK and an articles was written about how the citzens would feel with self driving cars on the road. In this article it stats “The UK government has stated its vision to have driverless cars on UK roads by 2021, but nearly a quarter of the UK public said they felt apprehensive about the prospect of self-driving cars on the roads in the next three years, and a fifth of respondents felt fearful.” If someone was intoxicated and they swerved suddenly into the side of the self driving car will the self driving car be able to see or avoid it? We don’t know there are many ethical and moral decisions for self driving cars and what they will actually do in a life or death situation.

Do self driving cars have morals? Will the self driving car swerve off the road avoiding a dog and drive into some bushes or will the car hit the dog and not swerve off the road. According to a PBS article written about how cars will make life or death decisions is was said that “But some coders say that while these hypothetical situations are interesting, they are misleading because autonomous cars do not make judgments based on value, they make them based on protocol. While moral decisions will come into play when programmers decide how to use which algorithms, an assistant professor in computer science at Carnegie Melon University said the car itself does not have a moral agency.” They are saying the car will already know what to do when that situation arises. The car will know the outcome of what is going to happen before you do, because a group of programmers made these algorithms to help guide the car to make the best decision for the car and the passenger.

In addition to all of these problems that arise from self driving cars there are many problems that will affect humans when self driving cars hit the roads in numbers. These self driving cars will be fully electric therefore that means there will be no more use for gas stations and gas station workers. Also self driving cars last a really long time and many people won’t need to purchase a new car every 3-7 years like most people normally do. It seems that there is a lot of small problems that are rising from the self driving cars. Hopefully none of these things happen and the self driving car actually boost job opportunities.

There are major benefits for self driving cars that could potentially save the earth from pollution. Self driving cars run on batteries therefore there will be no more gas being burned into the air from the millions of cars driving everyday. All cars will be charged by pulling the charger into your house that could be powered by solar panels and that could help save the planet a bit more.

It is inevitable that the world will soon have all self driving cars and the days with humans driving the cars will just be a thing of the past. The only thing that is stopping this from happening a lot sooner is the difficulties in perfecting the technology of the self driving car.

reference

Kelkar, K. (2016, May 28). How will driverless cars make life-or-death decisions? Retrieved October 12, 2020, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-will-driverless-cars-make-life-or-death-decisions

Kelkar, K. (2016, May 28). How will driverless cars make life-or-death decisions? Retrieved October 12, 2020, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/how-will-driverless-cars-make-life-or-death-decisions