
Could you imagine being the only person in a car, but as a passenger instead of the driver? Self-driving cars have made this phenomenon possible by allowing people to give up being the one to control the car and relying on the car to get them from one place to another. Although technology is advancing at an exponential rate, we as users are often faced with many technological defects dealing with performance issues which, in turn, may negatively impact the owner of the product. Self-driving cars have been a concern for the future due to many speculations involving their safety features and how these cars will impact our everyday lives. Multiple companies such as Tesla, Google, Ford, BMW, and many more that are currently testing out this innovation.The accidents involving these cars are caused by the technological difficulties, and people are contemplating on whether or not they would be willing to be heavily dependent on self-driving cars for traveling. I argue that self-driving cars are not ready to be put on the roads because there are still system malfunctions that negatively affect the car’s performance and therefore, make them unsafe. 


The characteristics of the systems embedded in these autonomous vehicles can be compared to the role of a driver.  For example, similar to how a human driver uses their eyes to see the road ahead and to transfer visual data to the brain, autonomous vehicles use a combination of sensors to transmit data about the surrounding environment to its computer processors. Naturally, new technology often has some error within it. Even though these issues can be removed, when it involves people’s safety, these issues can leave an unfavorable impression on this innovation, because people are more reluctant to accept the new technology. 

Recently, there have been incidents where self-driving cars were the catalyst for numerous accidents that have proceeded after this one. According to an article by Larry Greenemeier, on May 7, 2016, there was a fatal accident involving a person test driving the Tesla Motors car that was using its Autopilot feature on a main road, and it subsequently collided into an 18-wheel tractor-trailer. At the time, this tractor was making a left turn in front of the 2015 Tesla Model S that was being controlled by the car’s operating system, and the car failed to apply the brakes as a truck passed in front. Since the car’s sensors did not pick up on the truck that was in its path, the car continued as if there was nothing in front of it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said that the autopilot of the autonomous car nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer because the light colored vehicle blended in with the brightly lit sky.  

Tesla acknowledged this crash a week later and stated that the autopilot was disabled by a default in the cars. This proves how unpredictable technology can be and this innovation is not worth putting lives at risk. Before drivers engage the autopilot feature, they are cautioned that the technology is still in the testing phase because there is a chance that this could happen again. Drivers are also warned that Autopilot “is an assist feature that requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel at all times” (NHTSA 2015: 1). This will allow the driver to take control of the car in situations like this. 

On the other hand, Bianca Bosket has a different perspective on the issue with these vehicles. In her article,” No One Understands The Scariest, Most Dangerous Part of A Self-Driving Car: Us” Clifford Nass, a Stanford University professor and director of the Revs Program says, “There are going to be times where the driver has to take over. And that turns out to be by far the most dangerous and totally understudied issue” (Nass 2013: 1).  



The technology that is incorporated in more than 70,000 Tesla vehicles to avoid these kinds of incidents demonstrates how far these vehicles have to go before they are safe enough to be put on the road. One of the primary sensors implemented in these vehicles is the Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR), which assists by using radio waves to scan the road in front of the vehicle for potential obstacles. Michael Jellen, president and chief of Velodyne LIDAR, says “driving into the sunrise or sunset, of course, night driving—these are all extremely tough challenges for anything that’s not LIDAR-based,” (Plungis 2). Even though the sensors role is to illustrate what it is surrounding the car and provides the route that is safe to take; it does have its limits. Another limit would include having the capability to differentiate between something that is living or nonliving. It would be a tragic situation if the car got these two important features mixed up because it is a life or lives that are on the line. 


Technology is always exponentially innovating and becoming more advanced as time goes on. Google’s Self-Driving Car Project began in 2009 and has numerous amounts of features that give it the ability to execute the same roles the driver does. Google studies showed that the collision rate for self-driving cars is 3.2 accidents for every one million miles driven while for traditional vehicles the collision rate is 4.2 accidents. A reason why these vehicles have a lower collision rate is that they have the capability to share data between one another in order to interpret its surrounding environment. However, the sensors and cameras that enable them to see and make decisions are sometimes not accurate (Raymundo 2016). Thus, that is why these are still in the experimental stage since they are not reliable to pick up everything around it.

In the article “Google Explains Why It's Self-Driving Car Crashed into That Bus” Raymundo, a San Francisco- based staff writer for Inc. and a Northwestern alumnus writes about a tragic incident that occurred; a Google car made the decision to make a right turn in front of a bus that was going through the intersection. The car thought that the bus driver would stop, but it misjudged the bus’s decision and continued. These programs do not have the same kind of judgment that people do, most human drivers would have corrected ourselves and stopped. Christopher Urmson, the project director of Google’s Self-Driving cars, explains that “the pros of developing this technology outweighs the cons, and that he expects more serious accidents in the future as Google’s self-driving cars are tested in new, challenging situations.” This shows that this innovation will always have some sort of issue because technology is unpredictable. 


One of the biggest concerns dealing with these cars includes the software that enables the systems to operate the car. Rob Toew, a co-founder of Stanford/Harvard Forum on The Future of Transportation (SHFFT) writes about the internal network of these cars that could allow hackers to access the electronic control units (ECUs). No one knows the extent to which one could hack into the system and cause harm to others by putting them in danger. There are defensive solutions that can be used to reinforce these ECUs against the possible attacks. 


The difference between the car and the person is that one can make ethical decisions when exposed to a situation. People can make different decisions than a computer system would make because the sensors do not have the capability of deciphering the same things that we can, such as what is alive and what is not, people giving direction, spontaneous situations.  This goes along with miscalculations caused by the sensors that have yet to be perfected. For example, if there was a situation where a car had to maneuver but avoid people on both sides of it, the system would not know what to do in that predicament. A person would be able to make a decision in less black and white scenarios. This shows that in scenarios like this one, the car would not know what to and could make the wrong decision. Another example would include someone guiding traffic through an intersection. The car would only recognize the color of the light rather than the individual who is keeping the congestion under control.


The equipment incorporated into these vehicles is incredibly extensive, which is what gives the car the capability to make decisions and ____. The Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) sensor can produce a 3-D profile of the entire surrounding landscape, has video cameras to detect traffic lights and signs, and more. The only issue involves using the information that the car takes in. In “The Challenge,” Smith discusses an engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a technical-team member at the Toyota Research Institute, John Leonard. He says “Weather and human interaction are two of the hardest things to overcome” (Leonard 72). He explains that that means that there is something messing with the sensors, which is what gives the car the ability to operate the way it does. Since there are different kinds of weather that can happen, this issue needs to be fixed in order to face whatever this car has to face. That is why we measure the automated car by its ability to deal with the unpredictable. 


Several journalists had the opportunity to ride along in the back of a driverless car and write a report about their experience. Ultimately, the journalists say “the ride was almost boringly smooth, but navigating literal and institutional roadblocks in the future may make for a bumpier ride for the nascent technology” (Hustad 2014: 1). Although the car’s sensors knew when to brake at a safe distance, there are concerns, especially when it comes to weather conditions such as snow, rain or fog. This technological innovation has not overcome all the obstacles and can lead to putting people in danger.  

In the article, “Self-Driving Cars Gain Powerful Ally: The Government,” Kang writes that the Federal auto safety regulators are claiming that the nation’s highways will be safer if the highways were filled with cars driven by machines rather than people. Jeffrey Zients, a director of the National Economic Council, says,“We envision in the future, you can take your hands off the wheel, and your commute becomes restful or productive instead of frustrating and exhausting” (Kang 2016). 


In recent years, we have been in the transitional phase where some of the companies innovating these vehicles are beginning to enforce self-driving cars, but individuals are having trouble trusting these systems implemented into the cars. Once these companies have fewer accidents, people might be more willing to trust these vehicles. For example, in the past, elevators used to be controlled by people but are now fully autonomous. People used to be uncomfortable with the fact that they functioned autonomously, but now we do not think twice before using one.  A way that companies increased the general public’s trust was by creating a “safety blanket,” where there was an automated voice in the elevator that would notify the passengers about what was going on. This mechanism slowly earned their trust.

In the news article Driverless Cars ‘All About Safety’ Marco Della Cava, a technology and culture writer for USA Today, writes about the different pieces of technology utilized in self-driving cars that can make it more reliable and safer. This article contains several scenarios where the self-driving car’s programs flawlessly executed trials to see the level of accuracy and safeness. For example, they had to wait for a whole group of bicyclists to pass through the whole intersection. This is important because self-driving cars cannot only pick up other cars, but they were also able to detect people as well. Another test the car underwent was to swerve in between traffic cones. The project director, Chris Urmson, provides a statistic “some of 90% of accidents involve human error” (Urmson) and this information was gathered over the duration of the research enhances that self-driving cars can create fewer accidents. 

In the article, “Why Don’t We Trust Driverless Cars Even When We Should,” (Hosanagar and Cronlk) (2017) it explains how technological advancement, such as an algorithmic machine, are represented by these vehicles and is a complete substitution of human control. If we play the slightest role in donating some sort of control like decision-making or driving in an uncomfortable situation, we would be more inclined to allow cars to do the driving for us. Logg describes the transitions of becoming more accepting by describing some studies that were conducted in order to collect the data provided. “Driving is one of the most personal – dangerous – things we do” (Imran and Kartik)(2016). There is a lot of skepticism with allowing a vehicle to direct itself without any decisive choices being made by the person. All the research that Llog conducted, points out a theory; Self-driving cars make people more hesitant because they view driving to be a more personal experience or subjective. People have different perspectives on how much they are willing to let technology into their life because Computers are always having some sort of malfunction, and if anything happens, it can easily cause a disliking towards the innovation.


As mentioned earlier, the systems incorporated in self-driving cars are not safe enough to be put on the road. There needs to be more experiments to test out the reliability and accuracy that these cars could provide for us. The errors discovered over time will only benefit us because they point out the technological error embedded in these systems which will be fixed. In today’s society, people have become so dependent on technology because it makes doing things more efficient like transforming the form of transportation. Now that this car has been developing over the years, the software is becoming increasingly better so much so that it is not necessary to make the decisions of where the car can and cannot go. Instead, they rely on the pre-programmed software to do the work for them. Even though it does not have the capability to make certain choices that humans are accustomed to making, it does decrease the amount of accidents per miles driven. The accidents that do occur are mostly caused by system errors which involve some type of glitch that the sensors have in deciphering what is going on around it. Ultimately, these cars will be implemented into our future and be the main source of transportation. According to research projections, self-driving cars will start integrating into society beginning in the year 2020. Between now and then, the companies have a substantial amount of time to innovate and fix the systems used in self-driving cars so that it will be safe enough to be put on the road by 2020 and safe enough to put our complete trust into.
