Letting an AI control your car while you are chilling in the back seat or making last moment changes in the final presentation sounds really great in every sense. Even better, who doesn’t want a quick nap in the rides back home after a tiring day at office. A bit scary! Believe it or not, but that’s how we are going to travel in near future. Autonomous driving or self-driving is the next big thing and with some successful implementations already on the road, it’s no more a sci-fi dream. Every auto manufacturer and tech firms like Google, Uber are working for a piece of the pie.
Few months back in last year, Uber launched its first fleet of self-driving Volvo XC90s in Pittsburgh. You could almost hear the auto industry’s collective jaw drop after that. Suddenly, a company providing taxi service was offering a vision of future autonomous transportation.
Following its almost perfect execution in Pittsburgh, Uber decided to expand its territory of self-driving taxis to Arizona. And that’s where things went wrong. On 24th March, one of the Uber’s self-driving car got involved in an accident in Tempe, Arizona. The news spread like wildfire accompanied by an image showing one of the Uber’s Volvo flipped on one side and a dented Honda CV-R. The authenticity of news and image was confirmed by an Uber spokesperson.
“We saw the [Honda] car, it was coming fine on her end, but the other person just wanted to beat the light and kept going,” a witness wrote in the police report. “All I want to say is it was good on the end of the [Honda] driving toward us, it was the other driver’s fault [Uber] for trying to beat the light and hitting the gas so hard.”
Was it actually the car’s fault? Surprisingly, no! It performed in the way it was programmed for the situation. It was cruising at 38mph as it should do over a Yellow signal when Honda’s driver decided to take a turn 3 lanes across shielded by a fleet of cars in 2 of the lanes blocking the sensors of Uber taxi. Although the Uber employ behind the wheels saw the car in last moments, but it was too late and the collision took place.
The whole incident raises an interesting thought: a real driver might have approached the yellow light differently seeing someone troubling with directions. He might have slowed down, way before, seeing a crowded road.
Joshua Brown was killed last year when his Tesla Model S in Autopilot mode collided with a truck. Although Tesla came out clean showing it was more of Brown’s fault for not using brakes although he had 7 seconds to do so. Probably, he grew confident about Autopilot’s ability.
That’s the problem here, the self-driving technology is not yet completely developed. At present, it’s more of an assistance than a completely reliable alternative to manual driving. But the major question still remains; will a computer ever be able to completely replace a seasoned driver?
Anup Singh is a professional writer with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Durgapur. His love for content writing started 2 years back with writing articles and paper descriptions for college magazine. From then on, he has developed his skills as a technical content writer. He is also a passionate lyricist.