The Speed-Maniac Environment Versus The Driverless Cars
Who should be held liable if a self-driving car causes an accident? How do we protect consumers without stifling self-driving innovations with the threat of endless lawsuits? In the all-pervasive technological developments, how do we define a self-driving car distinguishing it from the traditional man-driven car? A self-driving car, also called an autonomous car or driverless car, is a vehicle that uses a combination of sensors, cameras, radar and artificial intelligence (computerized instructions and directions) to travel between destinations without a human operator.
To qualify as fully autonomous, a vehicle must be able to navigate without human intervention to a predetermined destination over roads that have not been adapted for its use. Companies developing and/or testing autonomous cars include Audi, BMW, Ford, Google, General Motors, Tesla, Volkswagen and Volvo. In the speed-maniac highway environment, the human-driven cars cause or get involved in accidents at an awful frequency all across the world due to a variety of reasons - error in human judgement i. e. the driver behaviour - topping the list, not faulty technology. Keeping human safety and that of the machine as a prime consideration, and using innovative information and computer technology systems as well as mature disciplinary wisdom of their respective fields, the technologists and the car manufacturing companies have come out with the idea of putting on the road the self-driven cars in order to tackle, if not banish completely, the accident problem which tends to cause untold misery to millions across the world. Reassured as they are, the leaders in technology and business believe that as control over the vehicles is taken from humans and passed over to machines, safety would dramatically increase.
Fully autonomous cars, they emphasize, would reduce crashes and fatalities to a small fraction of what they are now. The president of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers explicitly acknowledged superiority of 'artificial intelligence' (Rose, 1986) guided machine over human wit: “A self-driving car can't get drunk. A self-driving car can't get distracted. And a self-driving car will follow the traffic laws and prioritize safety for pedestrians and bicyclists. ” Supporting this hypothesis, Spangler (2017) lists a few cogent reasons in favour of self-driven cars: Sself-driving vehicles will ease commutes, returning lost time to workers; enhance mobility for seniors and those with physical challenges, and sharply reduce the more than 35,000 deaths on U. S. highways each year'.
However, the irony is that by developing self-driving technology that takes error-prone drivers out of the equation and improves safety, carmakers would get no credit for the accidents they save and instead expect to face greater liability. All said and done, the self-driven cars have become an exciting reality of our times as an excellent alternative to the highly accident-prone human-driven cars. These new cars are being thoroughly and vigorously tested for structural and functional perfection, technological precision, efficiency and safety devices. The proliferation of vehicles already on the road with partial automation shows how fast the scenario is changing, naturally leading to a complete automation of the cars. As things stand, growing number of cars include crash-imminent braking systems, which rely on optics to detect potential front-end impacts and proactively apply brakes. Audi, BMW and others have developed cars that can parallel park themselves with utmost precision.
