QOTD: Are You Afraid of Autonomous Cars?
We've talked about autonomous cars on the podcast twice in recent weeks.
We spoke with Greg Brannon from AAA about consumers' fears surrounding AVs, and now we've spoken with former TTAC'er Alex Roy about why maybe those fears are overblown.
But I haven't yet heard from you.
Are you out there in Best and Brightest land afraid of a semi- or fully-autonomous future? Are you ready to embrace it? Or do you just not care as long as you get from point A to Point B?
I think I am with Alex -- I still want to do the driving myself in some situations, but in certain other situations, I'd be fine letting the car do all the work. Let me drive when I want to and go autonomous when I don't.
But that's just me. Now it's your turn.
Sound off below.
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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There are several issues with autonomous cars. First, with the race the get there first, the coding isn't very complete. When the NTSB showed the coding and how that one car hit the lady crossing the road in the storm, the level of computation was very simple and too low. Basically, I do not trust the companies to develop a good set of programs. Secondly, the human mind is so very much more powerful and observant than what the computers are actually looking at, Lastly, the lawsuits will put the companies out of business. Once an autonomous car hits and kills someone, it will be the company's fault--they programmed it.
Not scared, but I would be reluctant to put my trust in it. The technology is just not quite there yet
'Afraid' is the wrong word. The question should be, "Do you trust autonomous cars to get you from point A to point B and all points in between safely?" And my answer to that question is 'NO'.
The only thing that concerns ,me is a government-mandated back door--you get in and your car drives you to the police station where yo are arrested for crimes against the state, or "you can't drive because we must achieve our energy conservation goals". Not to mention that once there's a back door, any sufficiently smart person can use it--you can't create a back door only usable by those whose hearts are true. So then there'd be the risk of someone telling my self-driving car to drive off the side of a mountain/into a river/etc.