It's quite curious, and worth starting by talking about, that yesterday or the day before yesterday I saw a video discussing exactly this topic of Self-Driving Cars, which addressed the promises that we would have a completely autonomous car in the coming years. The video specifically discussed the promises made by Elon Musk, who owns Tesla, one of, or the largest, electric car manufacturers in the world.
Unlike X (formerly Twitter), which was bought by Elon Musk and became a privately held company, meaning he doesn't necessarily have to answer questions or commit to deadlines, Tesla is a publicly traded company, so there are meetings with shareholders and Elon Musk himself answers questions from the press. And speaking of promises, the video highlighted that every year when he was asked about the autonomous car issue, the answer was next year, or in two years, and the curious fact is that this has been happening for some time now.
This issue of constant promises of a new business model, which would be a self-driving car without any human intervention, has begun to raise doubts about the real possibility of this happening. Is a car without human supervision, or without extensive prior analysis of the roads, something possible and accessible to the public? Sometimes it might even be possible, but what would the cost be? How would the servers be maintained? How would the collected data be used? There are a number of questions about this topic that have not yet been fully answered.
I'll be much appreaciated if you Votes, Reblogs or give any Tips. Thanks and have good reading! 🍀
Will we have Self-Driving Cars in the FUTURE?
To think about the future, we first have to understand our present. Analyzing current autonomous cars, it's important to highlight two points. The first is that they don't drive completely alone, because in many cases it's mandatory for the driver to be attentive to act at any moment and take control of the automatic steering. This alone shows that the company itself cannot guarantee with 100% certainty that there will be no errors or problems.
It's interesting to think in terms of percentages, because let's say it was written that self-driving works 99% of the time, would you trust your life to risk being part of the 1% where it might malfunction? I believe many would avoid that, and that may be precisely why companies require human supervision.
The second problem is a matter of technology. The autonomous cars that exist today, and I believe there are some that can drive certain stretches without a driver, generally have a human remotely supervising, and another detail is that the company has already done a complete mapping of the area that will be the route.
This mapping issue is another fundamental one, because it's quite uncommon, at least I don't remember hearing anyone talk about it, for any company to provide self-driving services to any region. How do these cars handle an unfamiliar or uneven road? Can they avoid unusual things that weren't considered by the algorithms, like something coming from the sky?
Finally, still on the subject of technology, the number of parameters and variables that these cars must analyze to be able to operate on any highway is enormous, and recently, in Tesla's own case, it was said that the cars will need upgrades to be able to store more data and process more parameters. Will that be enough? Could we be in a bubble of self-driving cars? Only the future will tell!
