Autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles

What are Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous vehicles are the future for cars and other vehicles. The technology allows a vehicle to drive itself and connect to a network of every other vehicle on the road to allow each car to know what every other car is going to do. The vehicle will only require a user to enter the destination that they want to go to and the car will do the rest.

It is estimated that around 10 million self driving cars will be in the road in the early 2020s as many companies are putting in a lot of resources into the technology. A few of the companies currently creating self driving vehicles, which is the first step to creating autonomous vehicles, are Tesla, BMW, VW, Jaguar and Mercedes. The main company for self driving vehicles today is Tesla with their current lineup of Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y all with support for the latest Tesla autopilot software. This software is Level 2 automation which means that the car will drive itself on certain mapped roads if the user enables it.

What are the benefits of Autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles save the owner money as they are considerably less likely to crash. Because of this, the price of car insurance will drop dramatically for autonomous vehicles. Almost all proposed autonomous vehicles are electrically powered rather than fuel powered. This means you pay less car tax and are much better for the environment. They also have the potential to change peoples lives by increasing their productivity by them being able to do work, send emails and have full conversations while driving as the car will be able to drive itself with no human intervention required.

What are the disadvantages of autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles hold potential safety risks. This is because electronic devices always have the potential to fail. This means that drivers are putting their health at the hands of their vehicle. Another disadvantage is that autonomous vehicles could cause problems for car insurance companies as they will have to decide whether the car is responsible for the accident or the person driving the car. It could also cause ethical problems for example having to choose between protecting civilians or the driver in an accident. Another disadvantage is that since it is such a new technology, the current self driving cars and likely all of the ones to come for the next few years are quite expensive, however this expense will begin to pay itself off because of how much cheaper the vehicles are to run

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