Technology is moving at a pretty rapid pace. One minute you're looking at the fancy gadgets in your car and playing with the infotainment system; the next, you've got your feet up in a self-driving car. Ok, so we're not quite at the stage where autonomous vehicles are on the roads, but we're not far off. They're definitely a thing, and probably aren't as far away from becoming normalised as you think. So if you're wondering about the future of motor vehicles, we've got you covered with everything you need to know about self-driving cars.
The cars you drive today are becoming more autonomous, with extras like automatic emergency braking, lane-departure assist and self-parking, but they're not fully self-driving. A fully self-driving car performs every action on the road without someone in the driver's seat.
There are many concepts out there being rigorously tested by the manufacturers currently experimenting with self-driving cars. But they're not cleared to be on the road, and the technology isn't at the point where it'll guarantee the car drives seamlessly without making any mistakes.
We're a little way off from walking into a car dealership and buying a self-driving car. So that'd be a no, then.
That's a good question, and you could argue that we don't particularly need them. Then again, when people were relying on horses to get from a to b, they probably didn't imagine a world where they could drive a car.
The people working on autonomous cars argue that they will be safer, as the human error will be removed from the equation. Yet, without any real-world data to go by, it's hard to prove the theory. So we'll need to wait a little longer before we know for sure if self-driving cars are safer.
The current prototypes require hardware and software to run, which is similar to pretty much anything driven by technology. The software involved connects a suite of sensors that tell the car to perform actions like accelerate, brake and steer.
For a car to genuinely self-drive, an element of artificial intelligence will likely be required so it can safely take you from Point A to Point B. Then there's the hardware, the physical sensor that detects the car's movements on the road. The sensors collect the data and make sense of everything so it can run without human input.
If there's a self-driving car, you can bet that Tesla has something to do with it. Ol' Elon likes to push the boundaries with his cars, whether it's making hybrids, trying to build underground roads in California or creating concepts of autonomous vehicles.
Uber is another company currently creating self-driving cars. Now, at first glance, a taxi service with no prior history of car manufacturing might catch you off guard. But Uber clearly has grand designs of getting us all ordering an Uber powered by self-driving technology. What happens to the current drivers is anybody's guess.
Ok, so there are six levels of self-driving technology, with zero being the lowest and five being the, you guessed it, highest.
We're getting closer to a world of self-driving cars, but we aren't there just yet. It will be such a fundamental change to our lives on the road when it does happen, so it makes sense that companies are taking baby steps. So don't go and forget how to drive just yet, as you've got plenty of time left behind the wheel.