JAN 25TH, 2018
AINUL ASYRAF ALAUDIN
IE 486: Homework Assignment 1
College classification: Senior
Gender: Male
Character: Risk-averse
Human civilization has moved towards automation ever since the first mechanical
technology was created. Since then, we have advanced so much that most menial works have
now been replaced by autonomous machines and they have proven to be more reliable, more
productive and more capable than humans themselves. They have helped us by allowing us to
concentrate on novel situations instead of routine and repetitive tasks. With this in mind,
autonomous vehicles are now within reach and their reliability is being debated. Should we
support the future of highly autonomous vehicles?
But before we can entertain that thought, there are some preliminary questions that
need to be set forth and answered. First, what do we mean by highly autonomous vehicles
and second, what kind of future is expected from them? Autonomous vehicles are self-driving
vehicles, vehicles that could operate smoothly with minimum human intervention. To be
more precise, when discussing autonomous vehicles, we will focus on level 4 of the
automation standards set by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). A vehicle is considered
to be under level 4 automation when it can perform all driving tasks and monitor the driving
environment in specific circumstances without any human attention (National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration, 2014). The future that is expected of autonomous vehicles is
that they would be able to completely replace human as the main vehicle drivers in the near
future. Thus, reinstating the initial question, should we support the future of highly
autonomous vehicles? My answer is yes, we should. There are many reasons to do so and
among them, I would focus on three that I think are most relevant and cogent.
Firstly, the obvious reason would be to reduce lives lost due to vehicle accidents. In
the United States, 32 000 lives are lost every year and 2 million more are injured because of
accidents (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2015). According to National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration, ninety percent of the crashes are caused by human errors such as
driving too fast, misjudging other drivers' behaviors, alcohol impairment, distraction, and
fatigue (NHTSA, 2015). In 2013, the World Health Organization recorded that there were
1.25 million death tolls due to road traffic accidents with millions more sustaining severe
injuries and the trend shows that it is rapidly increasing. Traffic accidents are predicted to
become the seventh leading cause of death globally from its initial rank the ninth (WHO,
2013).
Highly autonomous vehicles could potentially mitigate this situation because they can
overcome the common limitations of human beings and therefore substantially reduce the
number of crashes due to human errors. Autonomous vehicles would be able to drive for
thousands of miles without ever being liable human limitation such as fatigue, distraction,
and boredom. They also do not have any of the human vices such as drunk-driving, roadrage, and misjudgment. Autonomous vehicles have a better perception of the surrounding
because unlike humans they do not have blind spots. The built-in sensors in autonomous cars
cover the whole spectrum and have higher sensitivity than human attention. This lead to
better decision making, more-accurate planning of complex driving maneuvers like parallel
parking, and better execution such faster and more precise control of steering, brakes, and
acceleration (Nidhi Kalra, Susan M. Paddock, 2016).
Secondly, we would be able to reduce the environmental impacts caused by vehicles
and crashes. The fuel consumption by vehicles for each year is estimated to be around 1893
billion liters (Andreas Hermann, 2018). Mega cities around the world such as Sao Paulo,
Cairo, Delhi, Beijing or Mumbai are facing disastrous environmental challenges due to
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worsening traffic jams and the ever-increasing roads that are being built to mitigate the traffic
situation. This has resulted in reduced greeneries in the cities. This is also causing a rapid
increase in fuel emission that can cause serious air pollution. For example, in November
2016, the Delhi municipal declared a state of emergency because air pollution had reached
new levels of danger and had reduced the visibility level (Andreas Hermann, 2018).
Obviously, serious measures need to be taken, and this is where autonomous vehicles come
into play. Autonomous vehicles could reduce fuel consumptions due to anticipatory
accelerating and braking. It could also navigate the best routes to reduce the distance traveled
and therefore reducing fuel consumption. And when fleets of autonomous vehicles are in use,
traffic jams would be mitigated because crashes and common traffic mistakes would be
computably avoided. Billions of dollars saved from all of these measures could then be
redirected to other more important initiatives such as preserving the environment, better
healthcare, investments in education and so on.
In terms of land use, 43 000 square miles are used for parking spaces (Andreas
Hermann, 2018). This is equivalent to 141 times the size of New York City. But according to
a report from Ohio University in The Future of Driving, a significant impact of driverless cars
is that such cars can be parked in 15% less space. Currently, cars need to be parked with
enough space between them so that drivers would be able to exit after parking and enter when
removing the car from the parking space. With self-driving cars, vehicles can be stacked right
next to each other. Urban areas facing acute space shortage will gain from the transition to
autonomous cars.
Finally, we would be able to save human capital from being squandered. On average,
drivers reported making 2.2 driving trips per day, spending 50.6 minutes on the road and
driving 31.5 miles. When this data is projected to the whole nation, U.S. drivers made an
estimated total of 186 billion driving trips, 70 billion hours driving and drove 2.62 trillion
miles in 2016 (Tefft, B. C, 2018). And the combined hours spent in cars by drivers and
passengers come to a total of 600 billion hours a year. All of these hours spent in the car
could have been used for other productive activities. This would have an enormous economic
impact. With autonomous vehicles, drivers could potentially engage in many other activities
without worry such as reading a book, having a conference call, researching, cooking in
vehicles equipped with a kitchen unit and so on. This enormous relief from performing a
perfunctory routine of driving would allow people to relax and find new ways of structuring
their day. Autonomous vehicles would also cut travel time and recover billions of hours lost
to commuting and congestion. These cost/time-saving benefits are expected to be worth about
trillions for the economy.
In conclusion, autonomous vehicles can bring a myriad of advantages and could
potentially mitigate public health crisis as we march into the future. Though there still some
drawbacks in the development of autonomous technology such as misjudgments in complex
situations but these incidents should not halt us from innovating. Instead, they should serve
lessons to be learned from so that our technologies could better serve as. Past trends have
shown that autonomous technologies have slowly replaced many manual labors, and this
serves as a good indicator of the spread of autonomous vehicles. I strongly believe that in the
future autonomous vehicles would completely replace human drivers and trust would be built
between human and autonomous vehicles.
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References
Kalra, N., & Paddock, S. (2016). Driving to Safety: How Many Miles of Driving Would It
Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?
Number of road traffic deaths. (2016, March 11). Retrieved from
https://www.who.int/gho/road_safety/mortality/number_text/en/
American Driving Survey, 2015 – 2016. (2016). Research Brief.
Stadler, R., Brenner, W., Herrmann, A. (2018). Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless
Revolution Will Change the World. United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing Limited.
Lynberg, M. (2018, November 28). Automated Vehicles for Safety. Retrieved from
https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicles-safety
10 Advantages of Autonomous Vehicles. (n.d.). Retrieved from
https://www.itsdigest.com/10-advantages-autonomous-vehicles
The Future of Driving. (2018, October 19). Retrieved from
https://onlinemasters.ohio.edu/blog/the-future-of-driving/
Gerla, M., Lee, E. K., Pau, G., & Lee, U. (2014, March). Internet of vehicles: From
intelligent grid to autonomous cars and vehicular clouds. In Internet of Things (WFIoT), 2014 IEEE World Forum on (pp. 241-246). IEEE.
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