Technology for automobiles has been progressing rapidly toward the self driving car and that is what I will talk about today. You may have assumed that I would talk about the Republicans and the new Congress or about President elect Donald Trump, but I am sure that many others will cover those topics and not this one.
Right now most new cars have backup cameras and many have emergency braking to avoid hitting the vehicle in front of you. Plus some models even offer a detector to tell you if a vehicle is alongside you; so you would have no more blind spots. But the most interesting development(s) have been in the self driving car category. Imagine that you are sitting in the driver’s seat and there is no steering wheel or pedals on the floor. All you have to do is program your destination and off you go without you having to do anything.
This is not some ride at Disney or some futuristic dream, it is happening right now! Of course it is an in progress technology that you will not be able to buy tomorrow; maybe in five years or less. One of the problems is states like California; there they will not allow self driving cars without a steering wheel and the gas/brake pedals. The problem with a human acting as backup to the computer is best stated by the following article from Wired:
“A car with any level of autonomy that relies upon a human to save the day in an emergency poses almost insurmountable engineering, design, and safety challenges, simply because humans are for the most part horrible backups. They are inattentive, easily distracted, and slow to respond. “That problem’s just too difficult,” Coelingh says.
Coelingh is head of Volvo’s safety and driver assist technologies division and they have skipped the idea of a human being as a backup because of how inattentive we humans are. And yet states like California are having fits because they believe that self driving cars without a human backup are a hazard!
My own opinion as an engineer is that while the computer is less prone to being fallible, we humans are most certainly are and thus it would be better to have a redundant computer backup instead of a human one.
Google’s self driving car technology is called WAYMO and it has been tested for over two million miles and still testing. It is most likely the most likely the Google’s self driving system will be brought before the public as a totally working system before anyone else.
That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike
