Staff Reporter
Pietro De Sanctis
Throughout the years people have all been told that self-driving cars will be a part of the future, but are they really that important to the human technological progress? And are they safe?
Before getting deeper in the argument, there is an explanation to be made about how driverless cars would work. According to an article written by The Economist, to become a reality self-driving car would need to use a subfield of artificial intelligence, which would enable cars to teach themselves to drive by drawing on reams of data from the real world. The more the automated cars drove, the more data they would collect, and the better they would become.
This brings to the first problem, in fact, as of now, some recent studies done by Harvard Business Review’s reporters have shown that the costs of maintenance of self-driving cars by themselves would be too much to bear for almost everyone and that the cost of their production is way higher than the one of normal cars. Furthermore, with the full adoption of driverless cars, there is no doubt that many jobs will be lost in the process. The Canadian government in 2018 estimated that more than one million jobs could be lost to the coming boom in automated vehicles. A federal presentation predicts automation could kill 500,000 transportation jobs, from truck drivers to subway operators to taxi drivers and even courier services.
To answer the question about their safety, from July 2021 to May 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reported 400 separate crashes related to or caused by vehicles with at least partial automated control systems. In addition to that, in British Columbia there is the main example of driverless transit, the SkyTrain system, which uses fully automated trains on grade-separated tracks running on underground and elevated guideways. Just in the Vancouver area according to the most recent data from the BC Coroners Service, from 1987 to 2017, there were 86 SkyTrain-related deaths, roughly three a year.
In conclusion self-driving cars could be the future, but what is the need of all this if the risks are higher or at the same level as the ones of normal cars driven by people.
Sources:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/22/goldman-sachs-analysis-of-autonomous-vehicle-job-loss.html