Are you ready to try the ultimate cruise control feature and take your hands off the wheel completely?
Slowly but surely, cars are moving toward automated driving. Just ask Tesla Motors. The American electric car company unveiled its new Model S sedan, which includes features that allow it to park itself and sense dangerous situations. The model includes long-range radar, 360-degree ultrasonic sonar and image recognition so the vehicle can sense things like stop signs and pedestrians. The car isn’t going to take you all the way from point A to B while you are asleep at the wheel, but it is getting closer!
Jalopnik writer Michael Ballaban recently took the Tesla’s Model S Level 2 autonomous system, known as Autopilot, out for a spin in NYC.
Autopilot, if it isn’t a full autonomous system, is simple enough in execution. It won’t drive you to your ultimate destination, it won’t make navigational turns without your input, and it doesn’t know what the traffic light or the sign in front of you says. So think of it less like an autonomous system, and rather more like the ultimate execution of cruise control. It uses a forward-looking radar, a front-facing camera, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and GPS to make sure everything stays on the road, and it seems to work well enough using those.
I enjoyed his honesty of being freaked out that he would be hurt during his review. We all need time to adjust to new tech marvels.
Elon Musk, a co-founder of the Telsa Motors company, believes that human drivers will one day become outlawed as self-driving cars become the standard in vehicular travel. “It’s too dangerous,” Musk said at the company’s annual developers conference in San Francisco. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”
He later clarified on Twitter, “To be clear, Tesla is strongly in favor of people being allowed to drive their cars and always will be…However, when self-driving cars become safer than human-driven cars, the public may outlaw the latter. Hopefully not.”
I for one think it has to be safer than millions of people texting and taking/publishing social media stuff while driving. Let’s give a round of applause for people creating cars that make it their job not to crash.
