Blog 18: Driverless Car

A driverless car is also called autonomous car. When I first heard about it, first thought came to me was it would be so comfortable that I do not have to drive. However, there are many problems to enforce a driverless car system in a real road.

If there is a car accident because of the driverless car, then who take the legal responsibility? Should auto manufacturers take the responsibility or owner of the driverless car take the responsibility? It is now testing for commercialization, but there is dispute over who guarantee safety and security. It will become intensified if someone hack into software of driverless car and make an accident intentionally. 

           

An on-board map in the driverless car can cause a problem, because roads are changed frequently. There can be a sudden construction on road and closed roads because of natural disaster. The driverless car may be confused if the road in the map and real road are different. It will be so important to update the map frequently that there will no confusion.

           

Google has developed the driverless car and it operated perfectly in general situation. However, when it enter the road with construction, it stopped running automatically and changed into manual mode. Therefore, a driver has to hold the brake and tope the driverless car. A situation like this happened twice while driving 22km per hour. To overcome this situation, there will be more specific study and experiment on developing a safe driverless car.

            

A driverless car has to give and take information about location of a car and computer server while driving. It may cause another problem because the car and passenger’s moving route may exposed. In an information age, invasion of privacy emerges as a serious problem, so security of passenger and a car must be assured.

 Even though our technology is developed enough to commercialize a driverless car, I think there are still many problems to solve before auto manufacturers sell the car.