In last few years we have notice significant improvement in autonomous car or driver-less car or self-driving car technology. Let me explain what is an autonomous car – “autonomous car/driver-less car/self-driving car is a vehicle that is capable of navigating without human input.”

How it works

Autonomous car is actually a combination of software and hardware. If you compare us, the humans with an autonomous car, then software works as the brain of the body. There are three major parts.

Part 1 – Sensors

These vehicles have multiple sensors. These sensors collect data. These sensors are designed to detect pedestrians, cyclists, vehicles, road work and other movement from a distance in all directions. Collected data then send to the data processing software.

Part 2 – Software

Cars have specialized software that analyze the collected data and then make decision.These highly sophisticated soft-wares are able to predict the behavior of not only the cyclist or other vehicles, but of all the pedestrians in it path and around .

Part 3 – Mechanical

Rest of the body is a typical car. Except with few enhancement. Like the decision made by the analyzing software, is transferred to the car’s driving mechanism through an array of hardware.

The Problems

Driver-less cars are going to be the future. Soon it will be a house hold item. And will replace the human drivers from the public and commercial transportation system. People who work in those industry as drivers, will need to find a new career. But I am not here to talk about the future unemployment issue.
The idea of driver-less car is great but has some serious ethical and legal issue. Unless we have a clear answer of these questions, we need to think carefully about this technology.

Ethical Trust issue

Will the car ever harm or even kill the owner in order to save pedestrians ? In a serious emergency situation, who can stop the car from thinking or deciding, that saving five life (pedestrian at street) is better then saving one life (owner inside the car) ?

Car Maker Company File for Bankruptcy

To be on the road, these cars are need to be connected to various tracking system like GPS satellite, These service is provided by the car maker. Without these tracking system, the car will not be able to move. What if the car maker goes out of business completely, what will happen then ? None of the system will be available for the car to use. Scary part is no body cannot even provide any guarantee, that this will not happen.

When we have some assurance about these question, only then we can we can have full trust on driver-less car. Other wise, driver-less car will nothing but a big inconvenience to us.