Self-driving car, how far along are we?

Almost every car manufacturer is developing a self-driving car, even some technology companies are doing it. So you have to figure we’re pretty close to actually being able to buy self-driving cars right? We might be, but we keep reading about self-driving cars being involved in car accidents, like google’s car last month, or Tesla’s car in China which lead to the death of a 23 year old passenger. Even though both companies claim it’s not the fault of their cars, you can imagine people are getting hesitant toward buying into the self-driving car hype.

So how safe is a self-driving car? The reality is that we don’t know, and we might never know according to RAND corporation. They brought out a report which states that autonomous vehicles would have to drive hundreds of millions of miles to gain enough information to compare them with human driven cars. This would take tens of years at minimum, which makes it highly impractical. Google says that of the 12 accidents that did occur until april 12th 2016, all of them were caused by humans. But their drivers also prevented self-driving cars from causing an accident 13 times, by which we can conclude it isn’t safe yet.

How close are we to self-driving cars? Some car companies have already released self-driving features that gives the car some ability to drive itself. Volvo said that they will start selling self-driving cars in 2021. But we’re not there yet, President Obama recently said that the government must ensure consumers safety without hampering the industry with too much regulation. For self-driving cars to be available among regular consumers regulations need to be clarified.

I think we are pretty close to driving self-driving cars, I believe they seem a lot less safe than regular cars because everytime an accident happens it’s in the news. They might even be safer than human driven cars, I don’t know because not every car accident is newsworthy. What I do know is that I’d rather drive a car myself than be driven by one, I trust myself more than technology I guess.

sources:

http://www.nu.nl/gadgets/4324241/tesla-aangeklaagd-in-china-dodelijk-ongeluk.html

http://www.nu.nl/gadgets/4326770/zelfrijdende-auto-google-betrokken-bij-verkeersongeluk.html

http://fortune.com/2016/04/12/self-driving-cars-safety-study/

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/180256/20161002/volvo-to-start-selling-self-driving-cars-in-5-years-silicon-valley-research-center-ready-to-start-work.htm

http://www.businessinsider.com/obama-self-driving-cars-2016-9