When I first heard about self-driving cars I felt pretty excited. One of my lifelong dreams is to hire a chauffeur. This has only amplified now that I live in a place where I have to drive everywhere. I would love to have someone drive me at a moment’s notice. I could be dropped off directly at the location. No time wasted looking for parking and fiddling with payments. Best of all, sitting in traffic could be valuable me-time rather than white-knuckling the steering wheel and getting a calf cramp.
Some weeks ago I read an opinion article authored by an ER doctor. After having seen the grizzly results of many, many car accidents, he was advocating for more self-driving cars based on the statistical data provided by Waymo (available here). By all measures, Waymo self-driving cars demonstrate a significant reduction in injury and crash rates. This caused me to think about the expectations we might have about self-driving cars. Do we need them to be perfect? Or do we just need them to be an improvement?
When I thought about it, a self-driving chauffeur to a real human in some scenarios. Robots don’t feel sleepy or let emotions interfere with their driving. They can easily tune out distractions. You will never have an intoxicated or impaired self-driver. This could be reason enough to go autonomous, the perfect DD.
I read another article discussing how some parents rely on Waymo to help with logistics getting their kids around. They preferred Waymo because it was reliable and felt safer. No risk of a creepy, unreliable driver.
On the flip side, here are some of my reservations. Although the data shows a strong safety trend, I feel concerned about the heavy reliance on sensors. In poor weather, I’ve noticed that some of my sensors get confused. For example, driving in an icy rain one afternoon, it covered up something in the front of the car and impacted the braking. Recently, after a snowstorm, the sensors on the side of the car kept flashing indicating I was close to hitting something. I wasn’t.
Somebody hacking into the car’s control system is my other main concern. The information security is almost more critical than physical security when it comes to safety. So… will my next car be self-driving? I’m not sure, but I would definitely like to go for a ride.
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