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I'm Brian Cooley, from CNET ONCARS, taking some of your email about high tech cars and modern driving.
This one comes in from Jonathan B in Valindar, Germany, who says his question is about the aim of self-driving cars in general.
Is it really to be safer?
He says there will always be other cars that aren't automated and are being driven by human.
Thus exposing the rest of us in self driving cars to the same accident risk, he reasons.
Now Jonathan, it's an interesting question, because this is often seen as an all or nothing position.
But let's really dig into it here, into this idea of reducing accidents with self driving.
First of all, there are the inter-car benefits, so this is the area of cars dealing with each other.
And I would posit to you that even getting a fair amount of self driving cars on the road is going to increase our safety.
Even though we have a lot of humans still driving around those cars.
The self driving car will see the human driven car around it as just another obstacle to be recognized, processed and dealt with with its various machine reactions.
Now not perfect, of course.
But I don't think we need to get to an all or nothing fleet.
For self-driving cars to be extremely safe.
Then there's also the intra-car benefits, how self-driving cars, regardless of how they act with other cars, will help us get rid of the problems we have from drunkenness, distraction, and just plain crappy driving techniques that, let's face it Plague so many folks, who are driving their cars right now.
The third area of benefit is going to be the group, or the hive mind benefit.
Deep in the future, when self driving cars are talking to each other, are all reporting in as a group, to some kind of central control within a metropolitan area.
And we can really manage the cars out there, as a fleet.
Making sure every car is doing the right thing, in relation to the roads And the cars, the traffic conditions, and flow.
As opposed to the kind of willie nillie haphazard driving and decisions that we make today.
Bu that's well down the road.
And that benefits both safety, and of course, efficiency.
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