Good Idea, Chap: The Driverless Car

In late 2012, at around the same time when the world ended (21^st December), you decided that it would be a brilliant, and quite logical, idea to take the first week of January 2013 off and celebrate the fact that you had waved the horrid 2012 goodbye AND survived yet another Apocalypse.

Having had a rough weekend, you woke up on 7^th December only to realise that there was something terribly wrong with the world around you.

Yes, it was 08:20 a.m. and you were going to be late for work.

Putting on a suit as quickly as possible, you dashed out, got in your car, started the engine, got on the road and hoped for the best.

You played some soul music to calm your nerves as you did not have the time to have your camomile and acacia honey tea.

As your stress levels kept rising at a disastrous pace, your mind started to wander; you imagined what it would be like to lose your job and what life on benefits would be like and how you would have to sell your house as you would not be able to keep up with the mortgage payments.

At the point when your were handing in the keys to your house to the bank and wondering what a vivid imagination you had, you felt the airbag inflate as your head went into it.

You woke up in a daze and realised that, whilst day- dreaming, you had rear- ended the car in front of you and had caused a chain reaction as it had hit another car.

You closed your eyes for a second or so; you knew what was going to happen.

A rear- end shunt- liability was pretty straight- forward, no way around it- it was your fault.

• Your insurance premium was going to go up

• You were going to go through a lot of hassle with the other drivers involved in the accident AND your insurer

• You would lose your ‘No Claims’ bonus

• You would soon be the defendant in a Personal Injury Claim

• You had, worst of all, inflicted pain and suffering to innocent people through your absent- mindedness and carelessness

That whole episode was, of course, incredibly stressful to you and had resulted in a outstandingly disastrous couple of days at work.

You kept asking yourself how you could have prevented the above from happening.

What if, you thought, you had a type of device on your car that would automatically sense incoming objects and hit the brakes on your behalf when such objects were in an immediate and dangerous proximity?

Or, even better, a device that would somehow imprint a degree of ‘common sense’ in your vehicle so that driving would be made safer and more enjoyable?

You started dreaming once more, thinking of the myriad of possibilities that such a system would open up.

If the car was doing the driving for you, that would greatly reduce your stress levels and give you time to think about and focus on other things.

Also, it would make driving lessons obsolete and would save many families a lot of money.

It would, too, surely greatly decrease the number of accidents because machines rarely ever get ‘carried away’.

This would potentially mean lower premiums, less injuries and fatalities and safer roads, in general.

Everything would have been much easier, enjoyable and less stressful, you conclude.

And then, one day, as you were listening to your daily commute podcast, you found out that all of the above had only recently turned from a concept into reality.

Yes, the driverless car of the future, had recently been introduced by Google; further, Google had recently been given permission to use and test it in the USA (in Nevada and California).

Google claimed to had done 300, 000 miles without the car being involved in a single accident.

Further to the above, AUDI had recently announced that it, too, would enter the driverless car market.

A revolution was at hand; and you could be a part of it.

How exciting was that?

‘Very.’, you concluded as you got on your bicycle and left for work.

(If you are interested on how the technology operates, please visit

<< http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/trends-innovations/driverless-car.htm >> )