They are the stuff of sci-fi blockbusters, and soon, they could be coming to a highway near you.
In recent years, auto and tech companies have been racing to put the first driverless cars on the road. And last week, Uber announced that its first fleet of autonomous vehicles will be deployed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania by the end of August.
The plan is for certain users of the ride-sharing app to have driverless cars dispatched to them instead of regular cars. For now, however, a back-up driver will ride behind the wheel in case anything goes wrong.
Uber is the first to launch an autonomous vehicle prototype that will be used by actual customers, but it’s certainly not the only company in the game. Google is continuing to test its own self-driving car. Tesla Motors launched its Autopilot driver assistance system in October 2015. And Ford recently promised to develop a fully autonomous car without a steering wheel by 2021.
Driverless cars are widely expected to revolutionize transportation. They could save Canadians $65 billion a year in fewer collisions, reduced traffic, lower fuel costs and time saved in transit, according to a 2015 report from the Conference Board of Canada.
They could also help make transportation more sustainable, but the research in that area isn’t definitive. A ClimateWire article from January 2016 suggested that intelligent cars could reduce fuel use by flowing past each other with less stopping and starting, by taking more efficient routes, and by encouraging more people to ride together.
But the article also pointed out that driverless cars could actually increase fuel consumption if people who don’t normally drive start to use them, and if they’re not all electric.
Still, the potential impacts of autonomous cars extend past the pump.
They could improve transportation for the blind, disabled and elderly, according to AnnaLisa Meyboom, director of TIPSlab, a UBC research group that studies the potential of future transportation infrastructure. They could also reduce the space needed for parking, she said during a Q&A with UBC News in March 2015.
But how quickly driverless cars spread outside major urban centres remains to be seen. A 2014 Pew study found that 52 per cent of people living in cities wanted to try self-driving cars, compared to just 36 per cent of people in rural areas, as reported by the Atlantic.
In Canada, Calgary aims to have driverless cars on its streets within five years. And in January, Ontario became the first province to test autonomous vehicles.
But the Conference Board of Canada report suggests that Canada is falling behind other countries when it comes to paving the way for driverless cars.
Policy-makers “must act soon to keep Canada in the ‘game’ of automated vehicles,” the report reads.
It found that the barriers to driverless cars in Canada include potential job losses for professional drivers and a lack of clarity from insurance companies about who is responsible during collisions between conventional and autonomous vehicles.
Meyboom argues that self-driving vehicles could revolutionize public transportation in Canada, through driverless shuttles or taxi services. But she cautioned that legislation is needed to make sure driverless transit systems work.
“Otherwise they may decide that area is profitable, that area isn’t,” she told the CBC in April. “Which means you will end up with no transportation services to certain areas in some cases, or you will end up with a very poorly monetized transportation system.”
By Maura Forrest, 25 August 2016