Invasion of the self-driving cars

Posted On: January 11, 2016

Have you ever been on a long road trip from one end of the country to the other, and bemoaned the fact that you can’t just put your car on autopilot and read a book while the car drives itself? In ten years’ time that might be a problem of the past, because all signs seem to suggest that a technology that makes this common place is speeding toward us at full speed.

That’s right, folks, bona fide, honest to goodness, self-driving cars will be with us very soon. And this is good news for everyone, including people who don’t want to be in car crashes, because self-driving cars are 27-percent less likely to crash, according to some estimates.

How is this possible? Is it witchcraft? Unfortunately, it isn’t that, but it’s the next best thing. Or more accurately, a bunch of things, including GPS, sensors that pick up data from the environment, a computer system that makes sense of this data, and so forth.

Once one of these amazing vehicles is on the market, you won’t be able to take your old vehicle to the car wreckers in Christchurch fast enough, and no-one would blame you, as the benefits of owning a self-driving car are so numerous, books are probably being written at this moment, and won’t be finished for a few years yet because the amount of information in them will be absolutely huge.

But what if you didn’t even have to buy one, you only had to hire one over the net, and it got to your house from a local depot in the space of minutes. The cost of using them regularly over the course of a year would probably be the same as the current annual petrol budget of your average current automobile owner.

Whether it’s having a snooze on your way to the second hand car parts dealer in Auckland so you can keep up the maintenance on your vintage non self-driving car, or reading a leisurely book while careening down the motorway in the pouring rain without the slightest worry of crashing, the future will surely be an amazing sight for many a sore eye.