Driverless Vehicles Quotes

Soon, many of us will no longer need to own or drive a car. Instead, we will rely on services that safely and conveniently use autonomous vehicles to take us where we want to go.

Google unveiled its latest driverless car. It plans to build 100 prototypes from scratch, rather than modifying others’ vehicles as it has done in the past. The car has no steering wheel or pedals, only a “stop” and a “go” button. The two-seater electric vehicle can travel up to 25mph (40kph) and the firm hopes to pilot it on Californian roads within two years. However, there remain significant regulatory and legal barriers to its spread.

General Motors said it would spend $5 billion buying back its own shares by the end of 2016, placating investors who called on the automaker to draw down its $25 billion pile of cash. GM will invest much of the remainder in designing more-efficient vehicles and driverless cars.

Talk of automatic machinery replacing human muscle power goes back to the ancient world. The Iliad, Homer’s eighth-century BCE epic, describes a driverless vehicle, the tripod of Hephaestus, that navigates on its own. Homer refers to the vehicle as “automatic.”1 Aristotle, around 350 BCE, raised the possibility of machines replacing humans: For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, like the statues of Daedalus, or the tripods of Hephaestus, which, says the poet, “of their own accord entered the assembly of the Gods”; if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves.

When someone, almost anyone, is asked to describe paradise, he or she tends to imagine natural settings--waves lapping gently upon a white-sand beach, birds singing softly, or imagines him or herself lying in a meadow of wild flowers and tall grasses, walking through an ancient forest, sitting on a rolling green hillside, or looking out over a vast ocean. They do not generally imagine AI-powered machines ruling their lives. They do not think of drones flying drones flying to and fro, filling the sky like so many menacing, swarming insects. They do not call to mind the sound of screeching bus brakes, crowded elevators, people walking around wearing masks, or driverless vehicles failing to stop for them at a crosswalk. The world being quickly shaped and imagined for us is what the average human would consider to be a dystopian nightmare--not a paradise. Why are we letting our world be turned into a cold, heartless cyberspace fit only for robots and cyborgs and not instead, creating a paradise for ourselves?

While Detroit was fighting for its life, the seeds of the mobility revolution were being planted by companies from outside the auto industry, by players with a bone-deep understanding of digital technology and a passion for designing and delivering compelling transportation experiences.

Every major change in the technologies underlying our lifestyles, from gunpowder to steel to the internal combustion engine to the rise of electricity, has required a leap of faith and a major break from the past. Imagine the fear, traveling long distances aboard a rickety vehicle that burned an explosively flammable liquid and rode upon black rubber tubes filled with air. What could possibly go wrong?! Yet people quickly overcame their fear of cars and focused instead on how to improve safety and reliability.