December 26, 2024

Drive Your Way

Before the technology we know so well today took over our lives, there had been many predictions as to what the future would hold. For many, it meant intergalactic travel, instant teleportation, and the ability to create any kind of food item at a whim.

For the most part, these predictions by our ancestors were nothing more than science fiction, and much of what they envisioned never came to pass.

One common theme among future predictions is self-driving vehicles, personal cars and public transport that was able to function completely automatically without the need of human intervention. It’s an idea that has lived on for decades, and has finally truly begun to make its way into the modern world.

The idea is simple: create a vehicle that is totally safe to use, allows the driver to be taken to any destination, and requires that no manual input is necessary. It may seem like a long shot, but this is exactly what some companies around the world have been working on in recent years.

Whether it’s a trip to the store, a visit to a park, or a stay at a casino to play online roulette NZ, this is the future of self-driving cars in our modern era.

Where Self-Driving Cars Stand Right Now

It’s a great premise, and it’s always had a bright and promising future, but the reality of self-driving cars is that the technology still needs incredible amounts of improvement before we see the cars driving on the streets every day.

Some of the biggest names in the world are involved in their own projects, including Google, Tesla, and Uber, and while each of these has been pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the cars of the future, we’ve still got a long way to go yet.

A major set back for the tech in recent times have been two deaths caused directly by a self-driving vehicle. These deaths were caused for a number of reasons, but one of the most important is that the cars simply aren’t ready.

A modern road is difficult to put into a language that the systems that drive these cars can understand. There are often more variables than some people realise. One of the biggest concerns has been the ethical dilemma: if you’re in a car that is driving itself, it invariably will come to a point where it needs to make a decision.

If the situation arises where the car needs to choose whether to save the driver’s life or innocent pedestrians, what action must the car take?

What The Future Holds

The dream of the people creating these kinds of vehicles is that, eventually, the road will only be made up of vehicles that drive themselves. This would lead to increased efficiency in terms of fuel usage and traffic congestion, and hopefully a steep drop in the number of road-related deaths that occur every year.

For now, there’s a huge amount of work to be done, and with the recent deaths involving self-driving cars, many members of the public feel that they’re still far too dangerous to be a legitimate form of personal transport. We will simply have to wait and see what the future holds.

4 Wheels