Driverless cars, thanks to the , are no longer fiction, but a reality, and it is expected that most vehicles will be autonomous in the future. Despite both benefits and demerits, that the advantages of driverless vehicles do not outweigh the disadvantages.
One of the major advantages of driverless vehicles is that they reduce the number of accidents on the road. Such cars provide better traffic efficiency since can travel efficiently at an optimized and safe distance from each other by communicating among themselves and by telling which routes to take. It reduces accidents and casualties to a great extent.
However, the systems or the technologies, used to operate driverless vehicles, can malfunction or stop working at any time, . an autonomous vehicle could actually put the passengers in more danger than if a human driver were driving it. Besides, self-driving cars lack the ability to and outcomes. For example, a situation with only two possible options: one is to veer to the left and strike a pedestrian, and the other one is to turn to the right and hit a tree, potentially injuring the passengers inside the vehicle. Now, since both options are undesirable, which option would the driverless car choose? The Moral Machine, developed by a group at MIT in the USA, is seeking to address this critical issue by collecting data on real-life people’s decisions, but broad differences amongst different groups of people, making it very difficult to programme any definitive answer for autonomous cars. Thus autonomous cars are good to have but are not great to ride in!
So, based on the discussion above, we can fairly conclude that the shortcomings of driverless automobiles outweigh their possible benefits.