We all have seen someone riding around in that brand new Tesla, Genesis g80, or that BMW 740i that you’ve been dreaming of getting one day. From looking at review videos on YouTube to looking up pictures on Instagram, Google, Facebook, Tiktok, etc… all because of the self-driving feature it has with all the high-quality technology that they come with. Well, let’s just say some people aren’t really fans of the self-driving features and all the high-tech stuff that comes with these cars nowadays. Why? Because they rely on if the technology that’s being used for those features are going to be reliable and safe years from now without any issues due to the fact that technology does have failures and isn’t always going to work as you think. You might think that they’re just haters because they’re old school or just use to the old fashion way of how cars were back in the day years ago but they kind of have a valid point about the whole self-driving car thing today.

Car technology nowadays is becoming pretty much higher tech than before. Some people have their own opinions on whether they think self-driving cars are more reliable and safer but let’s not forget the fact that technology doesn’t always function the same all the time and can be unreliable sometimes. The concept of having a self-driving car is for its coolness and its fancy technology but after the amount of money being spent to manufacture these cars and putting high tech technologies that make these cars driverless without anyone operating it still doesn’t ignore the fact that these cars aren’t technology reliable as you think they are.

In today’s world self-driving cars are becoming more popular and another type of transportation. We all know that car companies manufacture new vehicles and release them every year with new technology added and some of those same cars are always on recall for some type of technical hardware or software failure issue that results into those cars being a problem to people’s safety on the street and that can be a con for autonomous vehicles. According to the company Dawn Project that is the world’s leading expert in creating software that never fails and can’t be hacked states that “Hardware and software failures. Complex electronic systems often fail due to false sensors, distorted signals, and software errors. Self-driving vehicles will certainly have failures that contribute to crashes, although their frequency is difficult to predict” (Dawn Project 2022). In this example, the dawn project points out a con about why self-driving cars can have failures as they are being manufactured and, on the streets, and that it’s not always going to be a positive outcome of them all the time. In this case dawn project has a point about hardware and software failures because technology is not always going to be functioning well all the time, sometimes after a while there can be system bugs that can cause failures to these self-driving cars causing them to function in ways they weren’t programmed too.

A big concern about autonomous vehicles is the safety off those cars while there on the street. Researchers believe that autonomous vehicles could be a better solution to putting an end to human error accidents. Do you think that is possible? Knowing that technology has its flaws and isn’t always reliable all the time, autonomous vehicles would most likely add to those human error accidents. According to Teena Maddox an Associate manager editor at TechRepublic’s she states that “DoT researchers estimate that fully autonomous vehicles, also known as self-driving cars, could reduce traffic fatalities by up to 94 percent by eliminating those accidents that are due to human error. Using 2016 numbers as a baseline, and multiplying 37,461 by 10, this means that there could be 374,610 deaths in a 10-year span, and 94 percent of these — or 352,133 — could possibly be prevented through fully autonomous cars by eliminating driver error” (Maddox, 2018). This shows that researchers think that with autonomous vehicles fully on the streets that it would help prevent and reduce most of accidents that are caused by human error and that it could save 94 percent of people’s lives over a decade span. This also shows how researchers see human error as more of risk than autonomous vehicles.

 

In an article “Driver’s view on driverless vehicles; Public perspectives on defining and using autonomous cars” they conducted an experiment to see people’s perspectives about the pros and cons about autonomous vehicles. They also conducted interviews with questions on the opinions of trust level of autonomous vehicles, are they better than human driven and gave descriptions of how they define autonomous vehicles using different levels. Christophe Schneble a PhD student at the Institute of Bio-and Medical Ethics stated that “Many of the participants agreed that self-driving cars can make faster decisions, either because they have more data at its disposal or because they act rationally rather than intuitively: A human being is out of control, perhaps he or she is too late on the brakes. Or the steering wheel shifts, especially in the case of a deer accident for example. Then you usually end up in jail because you somehow make an action, and I could imagine an AI would bring the car to a halt much more objectively. Should it make these decisions itself or should there be clear rules? So, I would trust the car. Really. I think you would even have to slow down the human being. So that he can’t intervene, and the car can decide where it has control. Like this (ArcInt13).” This explains how the participants in the experiment agreed more with autonomous vehicles more because their programmed to do more and respond faster to things than if a car is being human driven. It does show a point in why people would pick that over human driven but let’s not forget the fact that when those same autonomous cars have a technology failure, they would have to be on standby to take control.

Having trust with the technology of these cars is another point regarding autonomous vehicles. If those who consider having more trust in autonomous vehicles like regular human driven vehicles their most likely to care about the safety of their passengers. Schneble stated that “Participants’ attitudes towards self-driving cars were largely a function of their level of trust. Most of the participants did not have any negative reaction. Some of them expressed doubt especially on the issue of security (both their own and that of pedestrians and other road users), but interestingly, at that time, almost no issues were raised concerning prioritization in crash situations or other ethical aspects.” (Schneble, 2021). This shows that the participants in the experiment gave their opinions based off their trust level of these autonomous vehicles with concerns more about security of themselves and other road users.

It’s clear there have been a lot of growth in autonomous technology, and the move towards it looks very certain given the potential it could very much impact people’s lives. Nevertheless, it also presents many concerns, and addressing those concerns are necessary if the technology is going to be fully accepted by the public.

 

Reference:

Litman, Todd. “Autonomous Vehicle Implementation Predictions.” Victoria Transport Policy Institute, 3 Mar. 2022, https://vtpi.org/avip.pdf.

Maddox, Teena. “How Autonomous Vehicles Could Save over 350K Lives in the US and Millions Worldwide.” ZDNet, ZDNet, 1 Feb. 2018, https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-autonomous-vehicles-could-save-over-350k-lives-in-the-us-and-millions-worldwide/.

Schneble, Christophe O., and David M. Shaw. “Driver’s Views on Driverless Vehicles: Public Perspectives on Defining and Using Autonomous Cars.” Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Elsevier, 12 Aug. 2021, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590198221001524.