It’s all the rave, we’ve all been excited, surprised taken aback, and now are dreaming of owning a self-driving car as soon as it hits the market in the coming years. 2020 will mark the entry of many self-driving cars in the market.
And while we wait, and accept an advancement in technology and hard-work of mechanical geniuses, we should look at the whole picture. What really is the point?
The New Year is just around the corner, and the news of ready to use self-driving cars hitting the market in 2020 is exciting. It’s going to provide a whole new experience to people, who aspire to have a hassle-free, and driver free driving experience. Mercedes-Benz and Nissan Motor Corp have shown positive signs of revealing these cars officially in 2020.
Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan has made promising plans in the 2014 Automated Vehicles Symposium. He announced that the company by the end of 2016 will offer traffic-jam assist and an automatic parking system. And 2018 will show an automatic lane changing feature in the cars. It’s however 2020 the mark on the calendar when the company will offer a more advanced system that can navigate streets without relying on the driver. The software used by the various car companies is more or less the same, it all comes down to release dates and differences in specifications.
There are various hiccups when trying to provide such a complex machine to the general market, one of them being the pricing, technological glitches. In order to function with perfection, these cars will heavily dependent on HD maps, this could be an issue depending on the country the car will be introduced to. The roads of a country can’t be changed, the cars will have to made such that they will be able to navigate through random streets, that may not have proper names. The increase in cars on roads will also be an issue, with battling traffic. This may lead to the owner feeling more “out of control” than in control of their vehicle.
The consumers are getting a taste of what they can expect from the cars in the future. Ford for example already provides an automated parking system. It regulates your speed depending on the vehicle in front known as adaptive cruise control and another feature active city stop which breaks to avoid a collision. Jaguar Land Rover aka ‘the self-learning car’ introduced software in July 2014, which uses artificial intelligence techniques to learn your preferences and second-guess driving responses. The Google prototype that is doing so well without an accident is proving to raise hopes higher of the consumers.
The issue isn’t how well these cars will perform, the issue is when these technologically advanced gizmo cars will enter the market what psychological effect they will have on people. Yes, it’s technological advancement. So how does “losing complete control” satisfy us in the long run? How will the licensing rules change? What about the roads in India which are already overcrowded with no proper traffic rules followed? It is predicted that such cars will increase the number of vehicles on the road, how will that affect the environment? There are many questions that arise, and as the excitement builds toward the 2020 revelations, we can try to figure out if we’re ready to give up so much control to a brain that isn’t ours but made by us.
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