Is it the end of cars?

Not cars, but the end of drivers. Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and a much-admired entrepreneur in general, feels robots will make much better drivers than humans. Like he says, “You can’t have a person driving a two-tonne death machine.”

But we’ve been doing that for so long!

Not the smartest decision on our part, it seems. And autonomous driving, Musk thinks, will save a lot of lives. Imagine a world free of road rage, drunken driving or drivers falling asleep at the wheel.

Maybe it’s just propaganda for his cars.

His cars aren’t automated yet. But he does expect his electric car firm, Tesla, to be the leader in automated cars soon, the way it’s the market leader in electric cars today. But it’s not just Musk; the driverless car concept has been gaining much currency lately.

Who else is doing this?

Google is, for starters. It already has preliminary versions of its self-driving electric car out. BMW is planning a car series that parks without a driver in the seat, while at this year’s Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Mercedes-Benz unveiled its concept car for driverless living space on wheels. And a university in Wales has submitted a draft transport plan to use driverless cars to improve public transport in rural Wales.

They’re just concepts, for now. So I can still drive for a while.

Yes, but concepts with much financial backing. Chip-maker Intel has already committed $100 million for its Connected Car Fund, to research and innovate in automotive technology.

It foresees cars that can “communicate with the cloud, the transportation infrastructure and even other vehicles to provide additional services such as advanced driver assistance and real-time traffic information”. And in his budget speech for the year, UK Chancellor (the Finance Minister) announced an £100 million investment into driverless cars. Some of the money will go in to creating car-testing zones for driverless cars made by the likes of Google and Tesla, to fix bugs.

Bugs? Isn’t the point of driverless cars to be fail-safe?

That’s not a guarantee yet.

This isn’t worth losing my licence over.

First, you need to understand how a driverless car works. Google Chauffeur, for instance, uses a system called lidar: light detection and ranging.

It uses a combination of data from Google maps to identify routes and stationary objects (such as traffic lights) and uses the laser beams of the lidar system to track moving objects, creating a whole 3D model of what the driver is looking at and navigate accordingly, all very fancy and sensor-enabled.

That seems like a sensible system.

Yes, but what if somebody hacks into your computer’s autonomous driving system?

Oops.

Exactly. Besides, some people are also raising the ethical question of driverless driving.

Such as?

The same questions that face all advocates of artificial intelligence. What if a driverless car comes head-on with a school bus? How would a computer choose then? While cars will clearly be programmed to avoid such collisions, new laws need to be written to deal with these moral, legal dilemmas. Besides, what will a cabbie do in this new world?

But in general, driving is dying.

Musk, who seems to enjoy driving himself, actually hopes not. After his death machine statement, he later tweeted: “...when self-driving cars become safer than human-driven cars, the public may outlaw the latter. Hopefully not.”

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