Self-Driving Cars Just Got the Green Light from the Gov

[wendy]

When I was 15 and on the verge of obtaining my driver’s license, my mother enrolled me and my 13-year-old brother in a defensive driving course.

It was a course that young traffic offenders had to take to fulfill the requirements of their sentence.

My brother and I hadn’t committed any traffic offenses (not yet, at least). We couldn’t even drive then. My mother just wanted to drill the basics of safe driving into our young brains (and give us a good scare as well — our instructor showed us several graphic photographs of horrible accidents to drive her points home).

Besides learning the importance of wearing my seatbelt at all times, and practical tactics for making me a safer driver, the most powerful lesson I took from that course was how alcohol can impair your ability to drive, and the potentially tragic consequences of driving while under the influence. This was the early 1980s, a time when the US was experiencing a severe epidemic of injuries and deaths due to drunk driving accidents.

While it remains the cause of too many casualties on our roads today, drunk driving has been replaced by an equally vexing and tragic trend: texting and driving.

The National Safety Council estimates that in 2013, at least 341,000 crashes (and possibly up to 910,000 crashes) were attributable to drivers who were texting. A staggering 49% of drivers admit to texting and driving even though they know the practice is unsafe.

The issue became a personal one when, a few years ago, my father had a close call with a teen who appeared to have been texting and driving. He rammed into the trailer that was carrying my dad’s boat. If the teen had been driving just a split-second faster — or my father had been driving a split-second slower — the teen would probably have hit the driver’s side of the truck where my father sat.

My father was fortunately unharmed in the accident. But far too many people have not been as lucky as a result of irresponsible drivers who decided to steal a quick glance at the latest incoming messages on their phone rather than pay attention to the road.

It’s partly due to this incident that I’ve been closely following developments in self-driving cars. I've watched how the fledgling industry has taken off in just the past year, with advances in technology and major moves by industry players announced on a nearly weekly basis.

Just this week, Google scored a major regulatory coup when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) declared you don’t need to be human to be a driver. In a letter to Google supporting the company’s driverless car system, the NHTSA said that a driveless car technically does count as a driver:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/self-dri ... 7GtRj-4D81

[annie]

than999

[maureenho]

And when the technology breaks down I wonder what happens.