The invisible chauffeur

Driving a car is one of the most basic and common skills. For many driving means excitement, pleasure, relax for others the opposite, driving becomes synonym of stress and tension. The latter group will soon be relieved by the currently developed technology that will allow them to hit the road with a much more relaxed attitude. Google, Mercedes, Nokia, Nissan are working on this technology that will soon revolutionise our lives.

So how does it work?

While driverless cars look exactly like normal vehicles from the outside, the inside is a whole other story. The idea is rather simple: they take a regular, as seen on the street, car and fit it with hundreds of cameras, lasers, sensors, next generation 3D cloud-based mapping system and sophisticated computer software. This system will have to be powerful enough to cope with and analyse tons of data. It will have to process information such as: the driving conditions, weather, traffic, maps, speed limits and make decisions about the route, lane, speed of the car and so on. Cars will be provided with two types of communication: V2I, vehicle to infrastructure and V2V vehicle to vehicle communication which will enable them to avoid random collisions.

Automatic cars pioneer, Google, is building a fleet of Priuses and Lexuses that can drive themselves through a laser emitters, mounted on the roof. Google’s position as leader in the sorting of colossal amounts of information, allows it to develop and gain the most from 3-D virtual maps upon which driverless car will rely.

What are the benefits?

Automatization of the driving process will redefine the concept of driving. Road safety will improve, fuel efficiency will increase, traffic flow will be reduced. People who drive a lot, will be able to gain back all the hours spent in their car by being able to work, rest, play while on the road.

Disabled and old people will gain mobility by being able to drive.

Last but not least automatic cars will severely reduce the carnage of car accidents. In 2011, in the U.S. there were five million auto accidents and more than 32,367 people were killed. According to the AAA, all of this entailed a cost to the U.S. economy in terms of lives and lost productivity of $300 billion per year. These figures can be dramatically improved thanks to to this new technology.

There can be also reasonable opportunities for new businesses. Considering that private vehicles are 90% of the time unoccupied or parked, it is easy to see how this new technology can lead to the development of car sharing services (such as Uber) with invisible drivers, where cars appear in front of your house when you need it and disappear when you don’t.

When?

Although according to Daimler head of development Thomas Weber: “Autonomous driving will not come overnight, but will be realised in stages", many companies declared that they will start selling such vehicles by 2020. Even before that, driverless car will come in instalments in the form of features such as the “assisted driving”. They will be available even in mass market car models and will be able to keep safety distances, measure parking spaces, read road signs and warn the driver when to break. It will make driving easier.

Experts say that driveless car will be the biggest revolution in the automobile industry since the invention of the car.