My Thoughts about Self-Driving Cars

Self-driving Cars was a very interesting topic to cover. Self-driving cars are something that is super interesting to me and I’ve been keeping my eye on its progress and so far it seems like we are progressing at a good rate. One video that we watched really showed me a different way to look at self-driving cars. The TED talk “Is My Driverless Car Ready Yet?” by Dan LaBruna really opened my mind to the application of self-driving cars for people with disabilities. It’s something that I never thought about with it never being a problem for me, but it would really open up some freedom and independence for people with disabilities that make them reliant on other people for rides to places that they need to go. The prospect of opening up these new possibilities is reason enough to keep on researching self-driving cars.

There was a TED talk that we watched called “How Will Autonomous Vehicles Transform our Cities” where Nico Larco talked about how self-driving cars could end up changing how we layout our cities. He says that parking lots would become irrelevant and that it would then open up more areas for buildings because we would send our cars to just drive around and then pick back up when we are done shopping somewhere. I disagree with what he says because i think that humans are much lazier than that and wouldn’t want to wait for their car to have to drive back instead opting to have their car find it’s own parking spot and then having it come back to them from that spot when they are done. I also think that having your car go and drive around while you are shopping is dumb in another way by wasting eather gas or electricity driving around by itself. Imagine having your car come back to pick you up only for it to run out of fuel on the way back home because you didn’t park your car.

Overall I’m very excited by the prospect of self-driving cars and the possibilities that they open for people and i can not wait for them to become the new normal on the road.