Self-Driving Cars
Waymo, Google's self-driving car program, has had over 20 million miles of road traveled!
Self-driving cars have been a heavily debated topic over the past few years and the opinions on the matter are substantially polarized as many people feel that we are putting too much trust in computers and not enough trust in the hands of humankind. There are many reasons why self-driving cars are safer than a lot of people tend to believe.
One of the main arguments for self-driving cars is that it helps people who have trouble driving, find easy transportation. This is shown in Google’s test of Vehicular Automation when elderly couples and families test their self-driving cars. They were driven around a parking lot and through a couple of turns, to get the feel of the cars. Those people described the cars as comfortable, nonthreatening, and even at times, safer than previous driving experiences. One woman explains that she liked how the car slowed down before taking turns instead of breaking while entering the turn. She then looks to her husband and says that she is “always trying to get him to do that”. This example shows just how useful self-driving cars could be. The list of people who would be positively affected by driverless cars is substantially large including people in wheelchairs, people who have trouble seeing, or are deemed unable to drive because of age, people who have disabilities, or even people who are too intoxicated to drive, all these people would have accessibility to transit so that the roads would be safer and easier to traverse.
Another reason why self-driving cars are better for society as a whole is because they are safer than human drivers and are less likely to cause collisions. Humankind is accident prone and you see this with statistics. Over 36 thousand people die each year from car accidents alone, and of these accidents 93 percent of these crashes are a result of human error, including improper lookout, excessive speed, and inattention; things that average citizens are prone to do eventually, whether it be on purpose or accidental, that is a large percentage. Self-driving cars do not lose focus, they obey traffic laws, and they pay attention to the road impeccably, making for a safer driving experience
The number of miles driven per collision is also substantially lower for driverless cars. From Google's launch of their self-driving car tests in 2012 to 2015 their cars drove a total of 1 million miles and had only one minor collision that was deemed to be the car’s fault, in comparison to human driven cars were out of 3.1 trillion miles driven in 2015 about 6.2 million collisions took place. This comes out to be about 20 collisions in the number of miles it took for Google’s automated vehicles to hit something once. In short, human drivers are about 20 times more likely to crash than an autonomous vehicle.
Many people have a fear of self-driving cars being on the road for many reasons, the biggest one being fear of perceptual decisions. In other words. If the computer must make a choice based off a certain scenario, how can we be sure the computer makes the right one. This has a simple solution that many people who make this argument do not realize. The self-driving cars are more than just loads of sensors and rules given to the computer to follow. The cars have a built-in infrastructure called deep learning or deep neural networks, which basically allows computers to be trained through repetition. For example, if you want to train the car to go through a traffic light. You can set up a control scenario digitally and have the car go through that stop light. At first the car would not go through correctly, but through failure of the task and repetition. The self-driving car would eventually learn exactly what needs to be done. You can immediately see the resemblance to how humans learn to drive.
This can be used for any scenario, including swerving out of the way of an animal, or going around construction. And this allows the developers of autonomous vehicles to prepare their cars for the roads almost perfectly. In fact, Waymo, Google's self-driving car program, has had over 20 million miles of road traveled, but there has been over 10 Billion miles of virtual training that has prepared the vehicles in the ways explained previously. This virtual training can be done fast and efficiently allowing for their cars to be fully prepared for any situation.
In the end, self-driving cars will need to be tested and perfected before they will be allowed for substantial commercial use. Google's program, now known as Waymo, has made amazing headway and already has many driverless car taxi services. Driverless cars are truly the future. A future where people can be safe from the dangers of human driven cars including, driving under the influence and problems that arise from human error. Driverless cars are the next big development underway and each day they become more advanced, that much safer, and will continue doing so until they are perfected for the use of every single person who wants one.
- Crimson Wheeler, Service Technician