Advantages And Disadvantages Of Driverless Vehicles

Name Instructor Course Date Driverless Vehicles The goal of every industry now is to ensure efficiency. People today try to spend as little time as possible to accomplish the tasks in their daily lives. Due to technological advancements today, little time is spent in processing tasks. The speed at which today’s computers receive and process commands is significantly faster than the computers of years gone by. Because of technological developments, today’s machines come with computing devices embedded in them. The purpose of the devices is to ensure that there is a little human intervention as possible. From my younger years, I read news stories of how technologists talked about future self-driven cars. As a result, it would be possible to go to places without worrying about incurring the extra cost of hiring a driver. This scenario only occurred when I was reading novels fifteen years ago. However, it may become reality sooner than I think. Tesla had demonstrated their driverless cars videos in late 2016, expecting to accelerate the road tests of the vehicles. Several months later, Uber announced that their first driverless vehicle road test had been successful. Developers had optimistic attitude towards the products. These events meant that the technology industry was paying huge attention to autonomous vehicles in the past few years and companies strived to accelerate the development of these vehicles. Other companies followed suit and there has been widespread expansion of driverless vehicles. Despite the fact that driverless vehicles can bring countless benefits to customers in the future, some experts still claim that they have concerns towards them. Unfortunately, there was an accident that took place on Uber driverless vehicle and it created more doubts among customers. People’s attitudes changed rapidly and many of them became pessimistic towards driverless vehicles. From my perspective, indeed driverless vehicles are not perfect at this time but developers are more than willing to fix the problems they’ve discovered in the testing stage. Once these problems disappear, customers will enjoy all the convenience brought by driverless vehicles. Therefore, I argue that the benefits of driverless vehicles far much outweigh the associated risks and it is a bright idea that will change the driving experiences going into the future. Advantages of Driverless Vehicles Increase in Efficiency While driving to workplace in busy cities like New York and Shanghai every day, people would spend more than half an hour just on driving, driverless vehicles allow these people to work or relax during rush hours. Companies would no longer have to hire drivers to standby and it can significantly reduce the costs. Companies can invest the money into other departments in order to maximize companies’ efficiencies. According to Zushi (141), driverless vehicles drive more efficiently with reduced headways thereby reducing congestion and increasing the capacities of the highways. With the current vehicles that need drivers, there have been many destructions meted on highways. As a result, governments spend more each year to renovate these highways. However, with driverless vehicles, the situation will be a lot better and the highways will need less and less renovations. For commuters, they would be able to do other things with their time. During travels, people will be able to engage in leisure or work related activities instead of worrying about driving. In the past, most accidents have been blamed on people driving after having strenuous times at the office. But with driverless cars, there will be fewer errors. Using driverless cars will also enable raising highway speed limits due to reduced human errors (Hoffman 46). Driverless vehicles can help reduce carbon emissions and improve the environment Greenhouse gas emissions have been a hot topic of debate in recent times. To many people, the greenhouse effect is one of the largest contributors to climate change. With the traditional vehicles, there are increased instances of emissions into the environment. As a result, they play a critical role in the pollution of the environment. On the other hand, most of the driverless vehicles use electricity as the main power. Compared to the gas burning these days, driverless vehicles will produce fewer greenhouse emissions to the air and improve the environment eventually. Because everyone has to drive themselves to work, there is no possibility of sharing rides. However, driverless vehicles would make it easy to share rides and reduce emissions to the environment (Zushi 140). The vehicles also come with technical capabilities that are unmatched. Most importantly, the vehicles are designed such that they can run close to each other so that air drag resistance can be reduced immensely. Cutting down air resistance would serve as a way of conserving fuel. When vehicles use less fuel, then carbon emissions to the environment is reduced. Unlike human beings, driverless vehicles never cease to pay attention to features in the environment (Sparrow 3). Even though most driverless now are electric, they mostly use batteries that must be charged and powered. These batteries must be charged using clean energy. However, the emissions here are not as much as those from the gas engines of traditional vehicles. Unlike human driven vehicles, driverless cars consume significantly less energy when driving. On most occasions, a lot of gas is burnt when re-accelerating excessively, braking or driving at high speed. Self-driving vehicles remove these factors in the styles of their driving. Therefore, they burn less gas and the battery power consumed is also less. As a result, they pollute less air. Having driverless cars implies that there would be less cars per household. One car can take the children to school and each parent to work and take them back home. Developers can upgrade the system in order to create the best car conditions Unlike traditional vehicles, driverless vehicles contain a whole system which helps control the cars. Systems can be upgraded by coders based on customers’ feedback and gradually fix the problems that occur in their driving experience. However, for traditional vehicles, drivers had to send the cars back to factories and wait for several weeks to take back their cars. Besides, self-driving computers make it possible to have onboard computers that are capable of making hundreds of calculations per second (Zsolt 33). Using self-driving cars, it is as if they can make no error. Even though they are normally dependent on how well programmed they are, the programming codes are normally well tested to ensure that any error in the codes is effectively addressed. However, the programs are never immune to errors. But the beauty of it is that any error encountered can be corrected by a code that would directly be updated on the motherboards of the computers. The programming of electronic cars has been done such that they would suffer less physical damages (Jorge 259). As a result, the errors normally encountered in the cars are more software related than they are hardware related. Disadvantages of driverless cars Although driverless cars come with several benefit, they also cone with several downsides. The disadvantages include: Driverless vehicles encounter a lot of safety issues On the road, the first concern of people is safety. And yet, driverless cars have not been able to guarantee this. For example, the Uber accident happened a few weeks ago created huge debates among potential customers. People who possess negative attitude towards driverless vehicles claimed that machines will not react as quickly as humans. However, developers argued that even though this accident is pathetic, it cannot be avoided even if humans controlled the vehicle because the victim rushed out from the dark. What people have come to expect from driverless cars is perfection and yet this is not possible. The safety issues against driverless cars have been overestimated to say the least. For example Hawkins (n.p) holds that the accident that occurred in Arizona could never have been prevented even if a human driver had been behind the wheel. Many critics believe that...