Moving towards driverless cars

Last week, I left you with a question; do we have the technology to make driverless cars? Toyota unveiled a Prius in 2004 that could park itself. BMW and Lexus has followed suit so far.

Any driver who has ever struggled trying to perform a parallel park on a busy road (that includes practically everyone), would understand how useful such a tool is. It is the first – and so far the only commercially available technology that takes over full control of the car from the driver. Driverless cars are already here – at least by definition. Yet when someone talks about driverless cars, they don't mean cars that just park themselves, but cars that drive themselves safely through heavy traffic and testing weather conditions.

Automated parking is just one of the many Advanced Driver Assist technologies that are already in most common cars, including stability control which takes over control of the braking system to prevent it from swaying out of control. We already have rear parking sensors that warn the driver of obstacles and their proximity.

There are GPS devices that can track the location and speed of a car within an accuracy of a few feet and armed with road maps, they guide millions of drivers in the world to their destinations with clear and precise audio and visual prompts.

We certainly have enough cheap processing power to combine these different technologies to build cars that can drive themselves. If a driverless car is involved in an accident, who, or what will be held responsible? Most of the blame (and lawsuits) will be directed towards the car manufacturers who certainly don't seem to be too eager to make that leap just yet. Driverless cars still exist only in the domain of science fiction.

Advancements in technology may not even be necessary to make this dream of Si-Fi writers come true, because the technology is already here and it is just a matter of developing the applications. Science Fiction writers however, may rarely consider the physiological leap that technology usually relies on, to enter the reals of practical reality.

Is there a market for driverless cars? Will you feel safe inside one? Would anybody want to buy a car and not drive it? It is ironically the answer to such non-technical questions that often determine the application of technological innovation.