How Can Self Driving Cars Be Expected To Change Our Lives?
The very idea of self-driving cars on the road seemed preposterous a few years ago, and now it is seen as an inevitability that we will see this massive transformation happen within out lifetimes. So how will self-driving cars really change the world we live in?
This is a commonly asked question and often the person asking it is not aware of the complexity that lies underneath. Our lives as they are designed currently are designed around cars. We spend an increasing amount of time driving to and from work, spend close to 20% of our earnings to own and maintain our cars and devote vast amounts of real estate in our cities to allow these cars to run about freely.
Millions of jobs are tied up in the development, manufacturing, repair, service and driving these cars. What happens when we change these vehicles fundamentally?
Here are some changes that we can all expect to see once autonomous driving becomes commonplace.
Car Ownership Will Plummet
If you could have a car when you need and wherever you needed it, all the time, why would you want to own a car? This is something that is dawning on the car makers of today and some like Tesla are even embracing it.
It is estimated that an average car owner only uses their car for about a fraction of the day and leave it idle the rest of the time. This promotes wastage. Incentivizing sharing will ensure that we have a significantly lesser number of cars in the future than we do now.
Transportation Taxation System Will Collapse
With a decreasing amount of cars on the road in total and a huge decrease in car ownership, our current system of collecting revenue from tolls, vehicle registration, parking taxes, and others will no longer be a viable way in which to maintain and develop new infrastructure. Fines for breaking the rules will no longer be a source of revenue and people will eventually stop bothering to have a driving license at all.
A new system of taxes will need to be developed, one possibly based on actual usage instead of the one that we have now.
A New Era of Design Will Emerge
Our cars are currently designed in much the manner a cockpit is with the seats facing forward and focused around the driving instrument cluster. Once the car is doing all the driving on its own, this concept of cars can be turned on its head and radically different designs will emerge.
Driving or rather riding in a car will be all about comfort, productivity or even entertainment.
The way our houses are designed will also change once we do not have to account for the presence of any new cars. So no driveways or garages will be necessary, allowing for more space to be dedicated to living comfortably.
Studies also estimate that the manner in which our roads are currently designed to allow for human error while driving will mean that almost twice the amount of autonomous cars will be able to run without any trouble.
These cars should be able to communicate with each other and the traffic signals to ensure that traffic jams and waiting idly at signals are also a thing of the past.
Mobility for everyone
The biggest change that self-driving cars will provide is to allow anyone to be able to travel without restriction. Old people do not need to be dependent on anyone and children too can travel without adults (with certain caveats of course). People who have suffered a debilitating injury or are disabled do not have to compromise on the quality of their lives.
The future looks much brighter with self-driving cars in it and even though there are some prickly questions that remain to be answered, we as a society should strive to get to this future as soon as possible.
