I am excited about driverless cars, watching the landscape change as it becomes mainstream and solves problems will be fascinating to see.
When I drive around currently, I see people driving badly and think, automaton will hopefully solve this problem. Here are 5 driving annoyances which could be solved by driverless cars:
Inefficient Driving
It's always when you have to be somewhere, someone pulls out in front of you, and you get stuck behind them for miles. They are slow pulling off from the lights, indecisive, and clearly don't know the width of their vehicle. These are perfect type of drivers to be automated out of this role!
Unified pulling away speeds, road negotiation, and the algorithmic decision making of automated vehicles will enable traffic to flow more smoothly and therefore more efficiently.
Plus from the comfort of our moving entertainment centres, we won't have to get annoyed at them.
Courtesy
With traffic increasing by the day, and the daily grind of battling it, courtesy is easily thrown out of the window, replaced by every man/woman for themselves. This leads on from inefficient driving, when people are dithering the smart driver will use the situation to their own advantage.
In an ideal world, traffic would flow much better and use less fuel if everyone was courteous. Automated vehicles will negotiate courtesy with other vehicles based on efficiency of traffic flow, using data from the vehicle as well as aggregated data.
Accidental Roadkill
It's not nice to see an animal that has been run over whilst trying to cross the road, over the thousands of miles of road we have here in the UK it is actually a significant problem.
As well as larger animals such as deer, which could put human lives in danger in a collision event, the number of smaller animals and birds killed every year have been estimated to be in the tens to hundreds of millions.
Automated vehicle object detection systems will be trained to take the appropriate action to avoid these sorts of collisions. For smaller animals such as hedgehogs this could be as simple as positioning the wheels so they don't make contact with animal as the vehicle passes over.
The vehicles could also notify central monitoring systems that will broadcast the animal's presence to preceding vehicles so they can slow down and take avoiding action.
More accurate data collection will also enable us to understand the true scale of the problem, and mature those systems to save more animal lives.
Lane Drifters
You can see when someone it's going to do it, before they have started drifting into your lane, there is almost something about they way their car is poised that gives you a sixth sense on their next move. And then they start encroaching on your space as if you weren't even there.
What's most annoying about this is that normally they don't even acknowledge their mistake. The sooner they are automated out of the driving seat the better!
Pushing in
The flipside of drivers that are indecisive and slow, are the fast aggressive drivers that take every advantage they can, not caring who they annoy in the process.
One of the most irritating manoeuvres they undertake is where there are two lanes of traffic that then splits in different directions, one which is more congested than the other. Here the aggressive driver will use the other uncongested lane to overtake the queue before cutting in at the last minute.
Automated vehicles should level the playing field when it comes to courtesy and sticking to the rules, such that eventually this type of driving shall be rarely seen.
Whilst all these annoyances will still be with us for the foreseeable future, in time, automated vehicles will enable many of us to be driven instead of drive, improving collective driving quality and removing us from those road rage situations.
Although ironically, the intermediate situation may enable the aggressive driver to thrive, as cutting up automated vehicles will seem more victimless, and the algorithms that control these vehicles will be passive to reduce the risk to passengers.
Best prepare yourselves for some jolts and bumps on the road to a driverless society.
What annoys you on the road and how could driverless cars solve this problem? Let me know in the comments, and if you liked this article, please upvote, resteem, and follow me @hexydec.