How the autonomous vehicle will change the way we travel.
While we haven’t quite reached the point in which the fully autonomous vehicle is completely viable, we’re not that far away either.
Google has been developing its self driving cars for over six years and from a safety point of view, the results are quite impressive. Close to one million miles of real world autonomous vehicle driving and not a single person has been injured in any kind of road accident. There were some minor accidents, although in each case it was the other driver that was to blame.
I’m sure in the next few years we will see an influx of driverless cars inhabiting the roads we drive on, but that really is just the first step.
While they certainly operate more efficiently and with less risk than human drivers – in order for the autonomous vehicle to reach its full potential – it needs to exist in an environment where all the cars on the road are autonomous.
In this kind of environment, information could be shared between each autonomous vehicle. Each vehicle’s destination would be shared to all other vehicles in the area and vice versa – this would then be used to calculate the most efficient routes to take.
“If thousands of human-controlled cars suddenly started travelling down highways at 90 MPH, with little space between their bumpers, there would certainly be a lot more than 189 collisions per 100 million VMT. If all those drivers also started texting and watching TV, those freeways would likely begin to resemble war zones.”
“But autonomous vehicles will be able to pull off such feats. Indeed, their ability to travel at speed with less distance between them can potentially increase freeway capacity by 6 to 8 times.”
Apart from the safety benefits and huge reductions in traffic, the total amount of time saved by every individual not having to spend their time driving would allow for significant increases in productivity.
According to the Harvard Medical School, the average American driver spends 101 minutes behind the wheel each day. Collectively amounting to 5.3 billion hours a year spent driving.
“On a strictly quantitative level, at least, the man-hours that autonomous vehicles will save each year by making it possible to do other things while driving will far exceed the man-hours they save each year by eliminating fatal collisions. By fully embracing autonomous vehicles, humanity will free up billions of hours to spend in more flexible and potentially rewarding ways.”
Interestingly enough – from an economic point of view anyway – the benefit to society from the reduction in road accidents, is far outweighed by the aggregate amount of time saved by not having to drive cars ourselves.
“But what makes them truly disruptive is not only their capacity to save lives – it’s their capacity to save minutes and hours, and help billions of people live more productively year after year.”