a Fridy 1 William Pridy Professor Nadine Gordon UWRT 1103 3/28/19 re dak Bere How Self-Driving Cars Impact Society A topic that interests me is self-driving cars, While assisted-driver technology has been around for several years, completely autonomous cars are starting to appear. Most car companies are starting to develop and test cars that do not require a person controlling them. Companies ‘uch as Tesla, Audi, Google, and BMW are developing and testing driverless cars that can one day be sold to the public. The main reason I have chosen this topic is to explore the benefits and impact of driverless cars on society. Autonomous cars will impact society in many w including decreasing traffic, decreasing the number of accidents related to human error per year, and how the sale of autonomous cars could change the US economy. Before discussing how autonomous cars will impact society, it is important that one have a basic understanding of how driverless cars work. To put it simply, the car has a series of 1 detect where road lines are (Gupton). For sensing, where Fry eit OOM sensors and cameras that are used t objects such as barriers, cars, and pedestrians are, autonomous ears use a form of radar (Gupton) ‘After sensing and interpreting all necessary information, the car then decides what speed to 20, what lane to travel in, and is always prepared to stop when something runs in front of it with very little reaction time. Currently, fully autonomous cars are not legal in the United States, meaning even if fully autonomous technology has been created, it can not be implemented into cars available to the public until a law is passed, allowing this (Are Self-Driving)y » Fridy2 olf-driving ears have been in development for nearly 10 years, Over these past 10 the multi-billion-dollar company Google has been developing their own autonomous car, named Waymo. While developing Waymo, Google had Nevada’s Department of Motor Vehicles create a “driving test” for it, The test involved Waymo navigating a construction zone, driving on the in front of it. The car succeeded in all categories highway, and stopping when something ru 1g how successful except for travelling through a construction zone (Harris). Google, after s ne for Waymo to drive around the state of California. Waymo was, decided that it was t Beet consistant Waymo has been on the road for over five years, traveled over 10 million miles, and during this time, has been in numerous accidents. However, every accident Waymo has been involved in, none of the accidents were its fault (Burkitt). Seeing as how every accident was caused by a human driver colliding with Waymo, the theory that autonomous cars are safer than conventional cars seems to be reasonable. While having a car decide how to drive may seem like a bad decision, it is in fact a better alternative to people driving cars. According to Susan Gupton, eden XS round 94 percent of all vehicular accidents are caused by human error. Considering driverless cars remove the human factor from driving, the number of accidents would greatly decrease if human choice and human error was taken out of the equation ‘Another benefit of autonomous cars is that traffic and fuel consumption will decrease as more autonomous vehicles are present on the road, Some researchers believe that at some point. . in the near future, autonomous cars will be able reduce fuel consumption by up to 40 percent \«**' \p simply by reducing traffic on highways and in cities (Leong). This is possible because, unlike conventional cars, autonomous vehicles would be able to minimize stop-and-go traffic by Leong). These statistics were based off a study of a reducing braking occurrences by 90 percent ( handful of self-driving cars. Reducing fuel consumption by 40 percent and reducing braking byA v gurcon™ ntl Se tans Frigy 3 eS 90% on highways was based on if only five percent of all cars on the road were autonomous. ‘With having such « small percent of cars on the road being autonomous, imagine if 20 percent of iw P>\ all cars on roads in the United States. As car technology improves every year, one can only imagine how efficient autonomous cars will be in five years. ‘The production and selling of autonomous cars would not only boost the economy of the United States, but of the entire world. With Google spending over 1.1 billion dollars on the development of Waymo, companies working on the development of Waymo are growing and flourishing (Daily). This shows that companies are dedicated to creating a product that is safe for billion-dollar company spend over one billion dollars on the people to use. Having a mul wnt % development on one car should increase the public's desire to buy an autonomous ear one day." « ss y? ‘The autonomous car industry is projected to be a major player in the United States. Onee fully autonomous cars are readily available to the public, analysts believe that autonomous vehicles will produce around 800 billion dollars annually for the United States economy (Autonomous) _—_ This gargantuan number was decided upon by factoring in savings from better fuel efficiency, reduced crashes, and easier access to transportation (Autonomous). Reducing accidents related to human error would reduce injury-related medical bills by the millions, giving more people more money to spend. While fully autonomous vehicles are currently illegal in the United States ,except for ars would not only ely self-driving eat ont st ng American car special occasions such as Waymo, legalizing complet improve the United States economy, but the w orlds* economy. Considerin companies such as Tesla are pioneers in the autonomous car industry, having an American car company sell cars overseas could help bring back the United States car industry