Every driver on the road should be looking forward to the day when we can drive the first autonomous vehicle. You might think that this day has already been and gone, but it hasn’t. At least, not really because no vehicle that you can buy on the road is fully autonomous. We can look at Tesla’s Autopilot as an example of this. You might think with that feature you can sit back and let the car drive itself, but that’s not true. One driver found this out the hard way because while he was watching Harry Potter, the car crashed into a barrier. As such, it did need some form of human interaction.
Credit to the company, they do indeed state that drivers should keep both hands on the wheel and ensure that they are paying attention to the roads. Again, not really autonomous and this is the most advanced form of the tech that you can get your hands on right now.
Still that doesn’t stop us hoping for the day when vehicles truly reach this point of self driving ability. Why?
Safer Vehicle Fleets
Every year, thousands of accidents are caused on the road by heavy vehicles, and in most cases, this is due to a mistake made by the driver. As such, it would be certainly beneficial if these fleets no longer needed people behind the wheels. In fact, most accidents like this are due to fatigue and if there is one benefit of tech, it’s that it doesn’t get tired. You would still need someone in the driver’s seat of course because tech does malfunction. The problem here being that you’d be paying someone to do virtually nothing and there is certainly the worry they wouldn’t take their role seriously. Still, it would reduce the number of deaths on the roads dramatically.
Human Error
The example above is certainly a case of human error, and once you take drivers out of the equation, you completely eliminate that problem. According to a car accident attorney, one of the main reasons for accidents is a mistake made by a driver. There are very few accidents that couldn’t have been prevented if the driver had made the right choice or taken necessary action. An autonomous vehicle would always do this.
Dealing With Traffic
Let’s face it, traffic is becoming a nightmare. In some parts of the world, it takes a couple of hours to drive a few miles to work. We are of course talking about cities like LA, and while La La Land made traffic look fun, we know it’s anything but. However, if we had autonomous cars, it would at the very least be completely bearable. You could watch a film while waiting in traffic or even catch up on your work before you reached the office. You could be productive without worrying that the car could crash if you weren’t at the controls.
We hope you see now why autonomous vehicles are desperately needed and why, no matter how much we love driving, we can’t shy away from this. One day, cars will only be driven by drives aren’t tracks, and the truth is that won’t be a bad thing.