Pros And Cons Of Driverless Cars

Why We Should Fund Driverless Cars To this very date, Google Cars have yet to be the cause of an accident with other vehicles. (Salkever) With the increasing amount of development in driverless cars, the topic has been brought to the attention of a broader audience of the general public with more questions on safety, what benefits will they bring, and how they will affect the economy. With all of these concerns, people have been debating on whether the funding of driverless cars should continue or stop. Google has shown how efficient driverless cars can be with a steady increase of the performance of Google Cars. The amount of benefits driverless cars would bring are very abundant, especially with the promising results given so far. The

The opposition claims that automobile companies lack the concern to address any hacking issues. In Edward Markey’s report, he notes, “Most automobile manufacturers were unaware of or unable to report on past hacking incidents.” The technology in cars as they, are right now, can be easily hacked and companies aren’t showing concern for it, so it’s hard to say that they would show concern to address the security for driverless cars. He even goes further to say, “Security measures to prevent remote access to vehicle electronics are inconsistent and haphazard across the different manufacturers.” This shows that the security measures that are already in place by some companies are not even effective. If the security measures that are in place are ineffective against hacking, then it will cause serious problems if driverless cars were released without security being handled. This once was a valid point; however, in recent studies companies have shown that they can easily prevent hacking attempts on the computers, so the opposition argument is no longer valid. For example, Dan Park said, “Where once there is a threat perceived, the system will engage, and it will be able to engage faster

Alex Salkever provides information on safety stating, “The number of accidents reported involving Google Cars over the past five years is a whopping total of 16. The significant majority of those incidents involved a human driver rear-ending a Google Car at a stop sign or intersection.” This shows that humans are prone to distraction because it is in our nature. Humans can and will get distracted by texts and notifications on their phone, stare off at something that catches their eye, or arguing with someone in the car. If we make the transition to driverless cars then all the possibilities of human error will be cut out, leaving passengers with a safe and quick ride. Driverless cars would also bring convenience and leisure with on road capabilities and features like, “automatic lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, and active queue capabilities while being supervised by a trained Volvo operator” (Connolly). This shows that the driverless cars will improve everyday life and commutes by taking away all things for passengers to do leaving them with personal time for zen and peace to get away, or enjoy the new found spare time however we please. It would be beneficial because driverless cars would change car rides from driving in traffic and controlling the car manually to a user-interface with features more focused