Cars?

               With the discussion of self-driving cars recently in class, I felt like it would be better to put my thoughts down in a medium where expressing complete thoughts is much easier (and less time consuming) to digest. Self-driving cars are definitely the future of the use of cars, but not necessarily soon. Firstly, having a split between self-driving and human-operated cars will not work very well. Although self-driving cars will have much faster reflexes than human-operated cars and therefore able to avoid most dangers caused by other drivers on the road, there will still be an issue with human drivers being completely unpredictable sometimes, so much so that the car might have an issue with operating around such unpredictable conditions; it’s easy to move away optimally from a swerving driver, but not necessarily away from a driver speeding extremely fast while you may be boxed in between other cars. Also, self-driving cars would need excellent GPS and up-to-date traffic/construction information to be able to deal with route changes on the way to a location. If the GPS systems become good enough, a route closure could be easily predicted in advance, and there would not be need to manually drive through an area of construction where obstacles cause different road conditions than normally predicted. While manual driving should be possible, it should be a last resort, since (in my assumption) no one regularly drives manually and may not have as much experience as they would today driving manually around other cars. Teaching everyone how to drive a car unassisted is a nice idea, and testing on that would be a good idea, but expecting people to still remember how to drive unassisted after a long amount of time letting the car automatically drive would not be an ideal solution. Elderly people still have trouble driving cars after they don’t drive for almost a year (around the holiday season / during an emergency), and I don’t expect the average user to easily be able to just jump back into the thick of things.

               Another important idea I feel that self-driving cars will advance is that of full-electronic cars (a la the Tesla Model S) being the norm, since running everything on battery-power is a lot more stable for a computer system to easily take into account (fuel systems can be somewhat unwieldy at low fuels due to the shape of a fuel tank) how much power it has to work with before refueling at the very end of a charge. A full-electric car norm would also be important for the other expected outcome I have for these self-driving cars: road trips. If your driver and passenger seat can spin or rotate (since you do not have to focus on the road), it makes it easy for you to hang out with any passengers you have in the back of the car (play a game of cards, a board game, hang out and drink [which is probably a bad idea]) and just go on a road trip with your friends. Instead of a long car-ride somewhere, it becomes part of the vacation in and of itself. Overall, self-driving cars would add many benefits to society, including safer roadways and more recreational activities (and perhaps more efficient carpooling) that would work very well assuming our technology will advance to that point with people not “needing” to drive unassisted.