Yesterday’s blog post considered how we might design a driverless car without the legacies of today’s vehicles.
In the meantime we have to deal with our own human failings on the road and already tomorrow’s technologies are helping us drive better today.
The day when driverless cars are the norm on our roads may be a generation, possibly further, away but many of the technologies that make autonomous vehicles possible are available today and are appearing in many new models.
Last year the MIT Technology Review looked at BMW’s driverless car project and made the point that the technologies are still some years away from being adopted, the features being incorporated in today’s vehicles are already reducing accidents.
Thanks to autonomous driving, the road ahead seems likely to have fewer traffic accidents and less congestion and pollution. Data published last year by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a U.S. nonprofit funded by the auto industry, suggests that partly autonomous features are already helping to reduce crashes. Its figures, collected from U.S. auto insurers, show that cars with forward collision warning systems, which either warn the driver about an impending crash or apply the brakes automatically, are involved in far fewer crashes than cars without them.
This fits in with the vision described last year by Transport For New South Wales engineer John Wall who described how Australian roads can be made safer through the use of smarter cars, roadside sensors and machine to machine technology.
As the MIT story illustrated, many of the technologies Wall discussed are being incorporated into modern cars with most of the features needed for largely autonomous driving being common by 2020.
Like many of the things we take for granted in low end cars today most of the advanced features will be appearing in top of the line vehicles initially, we can also expect the trucking and logistic industries to be early adopters where there’s quantifiable workplace safety improvements or efficiency gains. Eventually many of these features will be standard in even the cheapest car.
One thing is certain, while the driverless car is some way off we’re going to see the roads become safer as new technologies are incorporated into cars.
