People have an undeniable desire for automated (self-driving) cars: Think of all the fun things you could do if you didn’t have to keep your eyes on the road. A lot of Americans feel this way; about half of the U.S. population said they’d try a driverless car if they had the chance. But behind the obvious technological challenges of getting these vehicles on the road are a lot of scary sounding legal questions we’re going to have to handle if we’re ever going to drive around with our hands off the steering wheel. It’s hard to give responsibility for an accident with two human drivers, especially a wreck involving an automated car, let alone a car that’s only self-driving some of the time. If a driver begins drifting out of his lane but the …show more content…
In these autonomous cars, the driver (and front passenger too) can swivel around and make direct eye contact with the people in the back. This concept actually goes back a long way. Horse drawn carriges commonly used vis-vis seating for passengers. This is something people had fantasies about in the 1950’s. In the 1960’s, Chrysler imperials could briefly be ordered with an option that included a swiveling front passenger seat. Safety is one big obstacle. “Federal safety rules won’t allow swiveling seats because of the positioning of the air bags,” said Sam Abuelsamid. And the driver has to be attentive to what is going on and be ready to take the wheel if automated systems fail (Motavolli pg. 1-2). Humans might be the one problem google can’t solve. For the past four years, google has been working on self-driving cars with an emergency system to give control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency. But googles smartest people now say they cannot make that handoff work any time soon. Their answer? Take the driver completely out of the picture. Google has begun building a fleet of 100 experimental electric-powered cars that will have all the standard controls found in modern vehicles. Google has also added an E-stop button for panic stops, and a separate start button (Googles pg.