Technology has come a very long way to be where we’re at with it today, half a century ago it seemed like a pipe dream that almost everyone would have their own laptop and their own mobile phone as technology was expensive and not accessible back then. It used to be the case that only rich people owned a TV and now in most family homes there are several in different rooms. This is also true for cars, when cars were first in production it was only the super-rich who could afford to buy a car and afford to fuel it. In the 1920s cars started to be mass-produced, the newly designed production line cut down the time it takes to make a car from weeks to merely days which made them much cheaper and allowed most people to purchase one. 

The next advancement in modern car technology is likely to be self-driving cars. This concept would have been laughed at years ago, but technology has come so far and is so sophisticated that it now seems very likely and development has already begun on creating self-driving cars that are suitable for the road, you’ll be able to check which cars are driven normally and which are self-driven by doing a chassis number check which provides you with all the information about any car you have the VP number of. How these cars will work may be a bit confusing to many people and may seem dangerous, so we’ve delved into everything you need to know about self-driving cars. 

How do they work?

A prototype for a self-driving car has already been created which means it’s inevitable that these cars will eventually become widely accessible, there are still some tweaks that need changing before this prototype is fully safe for the road but the hardest part has been completed. Self-driving cars will work based on lots of sensors and complex coding alongside this to allow the vehicle to make sense of what the sensors mean, they also will have some of the world’s best and most powerful processors to allow them to execute the software. The sensors are used to allow the care to build a map of their surroundings, there are several types of sensors involved in this complex process. 

Radar sensors are used to monitor the surroundings, for example where other vehicles on the road are positioned, video cameras are used to look out for things such as traffic lights and pedestrians and light detection is used to identify lane markings on the road. The powerful software then makes sense of all of this data and sends instructions to the car’s functions like the brakes and the steering wheel. 

The Pro’s of Self-Driving Cars

There is a whole range of pros of self-driving care becoming widely accessible. If the majority of the population are using self-driving cars then this would make the roads much safer. It takes away many of the dangers associated with driving, human error on the roads often causes accidents for example if someone is distracted, this issue would be completely eradicated as self-driving cars wouldn’t make these kinds of mistakes. There would also be no more accidents associated with drink driving and there would be no more road rage issues. They would also be more time-efficient, say you’re late for work instead of looking for a place to park, your car can drop you off and then park itself. Insurance would also be much cheaper making it more accessible to people and they would make driving more accessible for the elderly and the disabled giving them more freedom than they’re used to.