A while back I took a weeklong vacation, and it was very much needed but I did run into a few snags especially with driving there. Along the way there were car wrecks, near misses, bumper to bumper traffic and a 3-and-a-half-hour drive became six and a half. This got me thinking should we embrace the self-driving car?

Self-driving in cars is becoming the new feature that is being added to nearly every new car, Tesla started the trend but now we see in Toyota, Honda and Ford is that self-driving is becoming the new must have feature. Now without getting into the nitty gritty and techno babble focus, this blog will be more on if self-driving should become the new norm.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA estimated that around 38,680 died in car wrecks in 2020 alone. In addition in digging into the costs, the more traffic congestion happens the more it costs their respective cities money as outlined by Forbes. And when I had to drive for work, traffic would cost me a half an hour to an hour each day depending on many factors. In doing the digging into the numbers, CNBC checked and said the average American loses around 54 hours in traffic and this was in 2019.

In digging into these numbers and the costs, would self-driving cars help improve this? As we have seen in our homes when we are utilizing automation it can lead to cutting costs with electricity, it can vastly save money and help us in the long run. If all cars could automate and communicate with each other this could very well cut down on the amount of car crashes and bumper to bumper traffic?

Another thing that could very well rise from using self-driving technology is car insurance, could you imagine getting charged less for having self-driving technology or getting penalized for not using that feature. Or even letting police not need to worry about speeders due to the fact that no one really drives anymore, or maybe even road speed limits won’t matter with all cars being able to see what’s miles ahead and make automatic changes to prepare for what’s coming. And finally, could you imagine never having to worry about finding a parking spot cause the vehicle knows when and where to park or can go to park itself? Talk about a dream

Now there is a downside to this technology, is that it is still in its infancy and there will be a lot of research and creation that needs to be built, but many companies are spending billions on trying to figure out self-driving cars from having the cars recognize other hazards on the road to even seeing people crossing the street at not a cross walk. There is still a lot to research and hopefully the government will push for a type of unified effort to help save cities and people money due to the amount of money and time that is lost by making all the auto makers and software companies developing this technology to work together to build a type of mesh network.

With driving to the beach and constantly being anxious and nervous due to the constant surprise traffic and near misses and just toxic drivers, it got me looking forward to embracing a driverless future that could help us in ways that we might not even realize yet. Could we gain a need of not needing a car if we could have a driverless subscription for a car? Could we cut down on pollution and city traffic since there are no more car wrecks causing traffic delays with people sitting in traffic. Only time will tell and if the technology proves safe, then maybe we will proceed in that direction.