Just imagine the things you could do in the backseat of your SUV while it drove itself to work. Self-driving vehicles are the answer to gridlock, road rage, and our nation's grisly highway fatality statistics. An average of 114 people die in cars on U.S. streets every day--one every 13 minutes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Smart cars could lower everyone's insurance rates and aspirin expenditures. Their efficiencies would boost economic output with relatively meager associated costs. Automated cars could do wonders for our national mood. So say more than a few automotive futurists.
The technology for building self-driving smart cars already exists. California's PATH (Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways), an organisation underwritten by scores of public and private institutions, showcased as far back as 1997 a glimpse of this future. On a swath of San Diego freeway, a platoon of seven Buick LeSabres pulled into a specially designated lane. Just inches apart, the cars tailgated each other at 70mph, while the drivers sipped their lattes.
But don't hold your breath.
Until accident liability laws undergo wholesale tort reform, smart cars won't happen. Until taxpaying drivers are willing to shoulder the costs for retrofitting highways, smart cars are a nonstarter. Until it's proven that fast lanes will ease congestion, cars that drive themselves are garaged in some gauzy future.
But the digital revolution has hardly bypassed the auto industry. Cars are getting smarter. Better still, the technologies that will appear in showrooms over the next 24 months will do a lot to ease congestion and prevent accidents.
Every car produced today has at least one computer on board--to manage the ignition, regulate fuel consumption, and control emissions. Most cars have several computers. High-end makes have a dozen or more, supervising everything from shifting gears to remembering your seat position. In the coming months, even economy cars will come stuffed fender to fender with chips.
Why? Car-industry analysts believe buyers care more about the dials and switches that operate seat warmers and the stereo than about whether the engine's intake valves are made of sodium. Compared with expensive manufacturing, chips are cheap and carmakers are happy to place them everywhere possible.
The BIG QUESTION about computers-in-cars is reliability in adverse conditions!
We had a bad flood recently in our part of Brisbane, and quess why late model
cars were most at risk? How water-proof is the engine-management-computer
installed in today's cars? Why isn't it always installed high-up under the dash
and throughly water-proofed?
With MORE computers coming to future cars - won't this problem get worse?
Seeing how world weather patterns are changing, and flooding is on the increase,
in my opinion amphibious cars are a major need!