The future is riding on driverless cars

After eight years of testing, Waymo — Google’s self-driving car project — is taking its show on the road, quite literally. Starting in March, the search giant’s sister company has been inviting residents of Phoenix, Arizona to be a part of its free ‘early rider’ programme, which allows families to try out Waymo’s driverless car. To meet the growing demand for test rides, Waymo has outfitted a fleet of 500 Chrysler Pacificas — a popular minivan in the US — with its self-driving technology. It is not just Google alone that has thrown its hat in the autonomous car ring. Uber, Tesla, Ford and General Motors are all contesting are challenging each other for a foothold in the self-driven car domain, which Goldman Sachs estimates will make up for 60 per cent of US auto sales by 2030. However, nobody is expecting a smooth transition. Innovations with a potential to cause massive disruptions have, very rarely, been adopted without resistance, and automated vehicles are no exception. Even before driverless cars become commonplace, an unfounded bugaboo that they are unpredictable and unsafe vis-a-vis human-driven cars is taking root. To be fair, safety standards for self-driven cars are a work in progress, and will always be that, given that computers running them will progressively keep consuming more and more data on how to respond to consistently changing environments. In time, these computers will have absorbed enough data to respond naturally to complex traffic scenarios, even those that would have invariably resulted in an accident. Meanwhile, humans are not getting any better at driving. Road accident deaths in India, and around the globe, are swelling steadily. Self-driven cars can save us from ourselves, if only they come here sooner.