Running head: ASSIGNMENT II: SUMMARY 1

Assignment II: Summary

John Doe

University of British Columbia-Okanagan

ENGL 109

18 October 2019
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Assignment II: Summary

In the article “Driverless Cars Work Great in Sunny California. But How About in a

Blizzard?” published in The Washington Post in 2016, the author Brian Fung investigates the

performance of autonomous vehicles under harsh weather conditions. By introducing findings

and opinions of other researchers in this field, he discusses the advantages that driverless cars

have as well as the challenges they are facing. With limited solutions to existing problems, Fung

then predicts that it is still a long way to go for all-weather driverless cars to be fully developed.

In his article, Fung presents the advantages through two main testimonials. Firstly, as

Tesla CEO Elon Musk mentions, the forward radar technology has enabled driverless cars to

outperform human beings with respect to visual range. Also, after testing cars in snowy

situations, Google argues in its report that their vehicles can adapt to storms and react

accordingly.

As for the cars’ challenges, however, Fung sees limited visibility in poor weather as the

first noteworthy disadvantage of driverless cars. Edwin Olson, an associate professor at the

University of Michigan, offers a potential solution: to teach cars’ cameras to match what they see

to what they remember. Another shortage of these cars is emphasized by Ryan Eustice, who is

Olson’s colleague, and he analyzes the fact that autonomous vehicles are not intelligent enough

to sometimes break their existing programming and think out of the box when necessary. One

further challenge of driverless cars, as Fung summarizes, is the possibility of contradictions

between different safety systems. Olson adds an example of the ABS braking system and other

mechanisms. According to him, the interaction of these different systems might be problematic

because they are manufactured by different companies.

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Despite the advantages, Fung expects driverless cars to be firstly released within a limited

scope and only under non-challenging weather conditions. He also predicts that fully developed

all-weather autonomous vehicles are not likely to come in the near future.
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References