3 Unanswered Questions About Autonomous Cars
Everybody is excited about the prospect of autonomous cars, why wouldn’t you be? Instead of having to drive yourself around, you can sit back and put your feet up while the car does all of the work. It’s also going to make driving safer because you remove human error from the equation. Driverless cars also mean fewer cars on the road because people probably won’t own their own cars. Instead, you’ll have a car that drops you off at work, then drives off to pick up the next person. That means there will be a massive drop in carbon emissions, especially if those autonomous cars are also electric. It’s no wonder that people are excited about driverless cars, what could go wrong? While it’s true that there are a lot of benefits to autonomous cars, the technology is still in its infancy and there are a lot of issues that need to be sorted out. These are some of the biggest unanswered questions about driverless cars.
Can You Really Trust Them?
There have already been a lot of reports of people being involved in fatal crashes in driverless cars. In most cases, those drivers ignored rules about having their hands on the wheel at all times so there is a chance that the crash can be avoided. However, the accidents happened because the driverless car technology malfunctioned. So, can you really trust driverless cars? Advocates of driverless cars will tell you that, yes, there have been accidents but that’s because the tech is new. Once it improves, we can put our complete trust in it. But your computer still freezes from time to time and we’ve been developing that tech for decades now. The truth is, you can never rely 100 percent on technology and there is always the chance of breakdowns, which means that drivers will always need to maintain some level of control.
Who Is Liable In An Accident?
If you’re in a car accident now, it’s clear who is to blame. When the other driver is at fault, you can make an insurance claim against them and get in touch with a car accident lawyer to make a compensation claim. But what happens when autonomous cars malfunction, who is to blame then? Somebody will need to cover the cost of the damage but how do you decide if you can’t decide who’s fault it is. It’s likely that there will need to be a complete change in the way that we handle accidents, how exactly it will work, nobody knows yet.
Could Hackers Use Them?
This is a very important question because all of the other tech that we use is incredibly vulnerable to hackers, could autonomous cars be hacked as well? The short answer is yes because it’s already been done. A team of hackers managed to drive a Tesla remotely, proving that autonomous cars aren’t safe. If criminals can control a car remotely, they could use it in so many devastating ways. Of course, you can improve security but that’s what we’re already doing with our other tech. Hackers are developing new ways to break security systems just as fast as we can develop them, so we really need to think about how we’re going to keep autonomous cars safe.
Autonomous cars are an exciting prospect but there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about them.