ShareThisDriverless cars are coming. We know. We've heard this kind of stuff before and there's still no flying car in the driveway.
But the technology for full driverless cars -- computers, radar and laser sensors, GPS devices -- is all in place. Lexus already offers a car that will parallel-park itself. In 2007, Carnegie Mellon University won a $2 million Pentagon contest with a car that changed lanes, merged, parked and negotiated busy intersections on its own.
By the mid-'90s, "hands off" cars had driven across the United States and Europe, over 98 percent of the time requiring no interference from the driver.
The innovations may come gradually, beginning with a government requirement that, beginning with the 2012 model year, all new cars have automatic stability controls to help prevent rollovers. And more companies will offer sensor-activated braking systems that will stop the car if the driver fails to.
And General Motors is apparently still on track to begin offering driverless cars by 2020.
The appeal of a driverless system is that it will allow motorists to do all the things they do now -- text, talk on the cell, fool with a laptop, eat, watch videos -- free from the distraction of driving the car.
One appeal of a driverless system is safety. Last year, the U.S. had 37,000 traffic deaths, more than 90 percent of them attributed to driver error. For traffic planners, there's the appeal of a system to fight traffic congestion by automatically feeding information to car computers.
There are issues of government regulation, liability and privacy still to be worked out. But the success of the E-ZPass toll-collection system suggests that motorists don't care whether the government knows where they're going.
The real hurdle may be psychological. Will Americans cede control of their cars to a black box? Will they have the confidence to do so? After all, if we can remotely perform delicate operations more than a mile below the sea surface with flawless precision .... Never mind.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
The End of Auto Ownership & Parking
What most of the scientists who are studying driverless vehicles are failing to realize is that driverless cars will likely mean the end of individual car ownership for most families and elimination of the need for 95% of parking - both of which would be tremendously beneficial to society.
The reason is because most people's cars sit idle in parking lots more than 90% of the time. The first large-scale uptake of driverless cars will likely be taxi companies. Considering $25,000 per year to operate each taxi for 12 hours a day providing an average of 4 rides per hour, the overhead for each ride would only be $1.43. Double that amount for a healthy profit margin and the average taxi ride still only costs you $3. Essentially this would be the cost of riding public transit with the door to door service of having your own personal limo driver.
Coupled with expanded mass transit systems, 20,000 driverless taxis could provide for all the transportation needs of 1 million people. With no more than 20 thousand cars on the road at any given time there would be almost no traffic, the need for parking lots would be virtually eliminated, household transportation costs would plummet, and safety would be greatly improved.