Anyone who dares to take a quick survey of the press surrounding autonomous vehicles, alternatively called driver-less cars, will come away with a pleasant, gooey, hopeful sensation dripping down the back of their brain stem. That’s because most of the stories churned out by the major stakeholders revolve around some kind of utopian vision, one where all your problems are easily solved, cars cost nothing, the planet and everyone on it is saved, and your dog is taught Portuguese.
The flip side of this is the rally call of the luddites, which goes something like- “Look out! The machines are coming, and they’re gunning for your driver’s license! Probably your children, too!”
But as always, you can find the reality caught somewhere in the middle. The potential benefits of autonomous vehicles are many, and do include some truly transformative improvements to the way people get around. But there has yet to be a technology created that didn’t have some kind of negative repercussion.
At this very moment, there are production cars all around the world that sport some kind of autonomous feature, making them “partially” autonomous. Recently, this has included stuff like adaptive cruise control, which automatically adjusts your vehicle’s speed based on the distance to the car in front of you, or blind-spot monitoring, which signals the presence of a car the driver might not see when changing lanes. There’s also emergency braking, which applies maximum stopping power when an imminent collision is detected, saving precious fractions of a second over human reaction time.
But there are autonomous features even older than these. Electronic traction control, and even automatic transmissions could be considered forms of autonomous driving.
Of course, the Holy Grail for this tech would be a “fully” autonomous vehicle that requires zero human driver input, and there are currently a profusion of major automakers and technology companies racing toward that very goal.
Audi seems to be the most vocal when it comes to announcing progress updates. Most recently, the German marque sent a self-piloted A7 from Silicon Valley, California, to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, traversing a distance of 550 miles on public roads mostly driver-free. Other big names include Mercedes, Ford, and BMW, with tech giants Google, LG, and NVIDIA all getting in on the action as well.
Clearly, fully autonomous vehicles are just now peeking over the horizon. But the real question is: why should you care?
Click past the jump to learn about autonomous vehicles.
Tech Tuesday: Autonomous Vehicles originally appeared on topspeed.com on Tuesday, 27 January 2015 08:00 EST.
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