Don’t underestimate the ability of politicians to get it wrong when it comes to driverless cars.  There’s a bill in the Massachusetts legislature which would tax driverless cars by the mile, allow municipalities to ban driverless cars and require that all driverless cars be emission free!  A bad approach to encourage rapid adoption of a technology.

USA today says this about driverless cars:

Experts say the self-driving future, at least as I describe it, is still a dot on the horizon. A recent Zipcar survey of drivers found a consensus that self-driving cars will begin to outnumber regular vehicles in about 25 years.

“The notion of actually prohibiting people from driving and controlling their own vehicles is likely very far off,” says Mark Prommel, a partner at the New York design firm PENSA. “It would require huge shifts that would likely happen very slowly in the infrastructure and planning of our cities, roadways and highways, not to mention the ways that cars are currently built, marketed and sold.”

Jamasoftware says driverless cars may  may use voice activated software.  You’ll tell the car where you want to go and where to stop.  Doesn’t this allow you to notice a Cracker Barrel billboard and then tell the car you’d like to stop at the next Cracker Barrel?

Scientific American says “When it comes to safety, autonomous cars are still teen drivers.”  Driverless cars will need to be introduced carefully to make sure that they are safe.  Driverless cars will must average 275 million miles per death to meet safety standards of today’s vehicles.  Tesla logged only 130 million miles in autopilot before it’s first fatality.

Paid Ad