The Romance of Driving is Going to End Soon

One of the biggest lust of owning a car I believe, is to drive a car. Take the pleasure of driving out of the car and I guess, many might not be inclined to own it actually.

But Google driverless car has already arrived. The proponents of driverless car argues that it will drastically reduce accidents. Studies have shown that by taking out human errors and emotions out of the equation, deaths on the road reduces by 90%. In India 16 deaths happen every hour due to road accidents. So by the equation it translated to 1,26,000 less deaths if cars would be driverless. Software on self driven cars ensures same mistakes aren't repeated. That's a huge boon.  Commercial airplanes are nowadays flown on autopilot technically.

The opponents argues, driverless cars navigates on radar inputs, data of road conditions and traffic streamed by sensors and video cameras, which can go haywire in case of tough weather conditions distorting signals. Further, computer systems can be hacked and can possibly be remotely driven with malicious intentions to create mayhem. They argues that this is why airplanes continues to have human pilots.

Google however recently revealed that its self-driven car prototype caused its first crash in several years of road testing. Reportedly it rammed into a bus in the Silicon Valley city of Mountain View - no one was hurt. The car actually misjudged the reaction of the bus driver. The opponents of driverless cars, counters that drivers across the world react differently to a given situation, some even irrationally and that it is impossible for computer cars to predict the reaction of drivers in precise way. Unless, off course all vehicles are computer driven. As computers and robots are more and more replacing humans in various forms of labour, the day might not be far when human drivers will be banned, totally. 

While at present we might endure a psychological challenge with trusting a computer to drive us to our destination, we will eventually fall upon to this mode of commuting entirely. The romance of driving is going to end one day.