Driverless Vehicles

Driverless Cars

 

A Wall Street Journal writer, Dan Neil, wrote a column about the coming of the driverless cars (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443524904577651552635911824.html#articleTabs%3Darticle) and in it I saw him state that 30% of people between the ages of 17 to 19 DO NOT have a driver’s license.

 

There was no link to the actual study by the people who did the research – nor who funded it – but I find that high of a percentage of non driver licensed people has likely been biased – by design.

 

Like any statistic, how you measure anything, the techniques used, who you measure and where you measure, will allow you to draw a totally statistically valid but different conclusion when compared to someone else doing the same study using a different universe of people.

 

If the study surveyed people only living in cities of New York, Chicago, DC and other high density living places – where owning a car is very expensive due to the road congestion and vehicle policies set by the cities – then of course people living there would not bother getting a driver’s license since the cost of owning and using a car in their city is so high it cannot be afforded. This leads to the logical conclusion that they would not bother to spend a hundreds of dollars – plus the time needed in time driving behind the wheel with their parent in a congested city - to get a license that you cannot afford to use so it becomes self evident as not being worth the trouble – thus they do not get a license.

 

Surveying people only living in Montana you would get a totally different result of likely 99% of people getting a license by 16 years old. If you do not own a car and drive out there you get NO WHERE.

 

As for the driverless car that the writer is predicting – which they have predicted since the 1930s – it will come due to local governments mandating it to be used “for safety” reasons at first but only in cities. After 15 years or so then the Federal Government will step in to “make things consistent” and pick the most stringent set of rules to force people out of having control – for their own safety – in all vehicles. 

 

In order to be safe, of course, all cars have to be tracked in order to do the traffic flow, and tracking ITEMS will be taken as a given, since they are only tracking an item and not the people in the car; so the constitutional limits will be legislated away for safety / technology reasons. Just like what is done with cell phones right now, they are all tracked and the location data is just kept by private companies – till it is wanted by any government agency which can go to any court to approve of it getting the data.

 

Moving to this world will take at least 30 to 40 years – the time it takes for existing cars to wear out and be replaced with government mandated built in technology needed for the whole system to work.

 

Course once all vehicles are automated manually driven cars will be the exception – and likely require mandated tracking systems be installed so other vehicles would know about that “old timer” vehicle around them.