Self Driving Research Paper

Are self driving cars ready to be released to the public? Many say that driving is very liberating when you have not driven a car in a while, but what if you never had to actually drive ever again? Self driving cars are a concept that is still being worked on with major companies such as Google and Tesla. They are the leading companies in the race to create a completely self driving car where computers take the steering wheel and you can just sit back and relax while heading off to your next destination. The possibilities are endless, but how long until the cars are completely safe and affordable? Researchers are quantifying how many lives could be saved when self driving cars hit the roads and the the results could be life changing on a literal level. It has been said in many articles such as a story written in The Atlantic by Adreienne Lafrance stating that “Globally, there are about 1.2 million traffic fatalities annually, according to …show more content…
Unfortunately, the cost only includes the lasers itself and many other components need to be added into that cost as one expert explains, “among other costs, there likely would be four smaller LIDAR devices elsewhere on the car. At $8,000 each, they add $32,000 more. Radar is another $10,000, plus a few cameras, for $6,000. For times when GPS is blocked—say, by a tunnel—you’ll need an inertial measurement unit, which is $4,000. Then there is a PC, a hard drive, a graphics card and other hardware, adding another $5,000 or so.” which means that you are going to be looking at adding about $60,000 to the price of the car. Remember that the technology is still very new, though and is improving rapidly among many different companies who are doing their best to reduce costs so that it can be marketed more efficiently and