Self-driving cars are the future, but that doesn’t mean the driver will be able to take their eyes off the road entirely due to physical and legal limitations.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Self-driving cars look set to become the future of motoring, but for many drivers — both in Europe and around the world — who dream of reading a book or navigating social media while on their morning commute, the reality of autonomous vehicles may not be so simple. The technology and quality of sensors used in autonomous vehicles may not reach the level where drivers will have the security needed to take their eyes off the road completely for decades at least, and even if they do, there’s plenty of regulations that currently prohibit drivers from giving up full control of their vehicle while driving. Given the physical and legal limitations of self-driving cars, many drivers who were expecting to feel as though they were in their very own private taxi may have another thing coming when the first fully self-driving models begin to emerge. Although driving aids have caused many 21st Century cars to be recognized as semi-autonomous, the arrival of fully-autonomous vehicles will see a much slower introduction into the marketplace, which is expected to begin on a small scale in the early 2020s. However, even when 100 million fully-autonomous vehicles hit the road in 2050, it’s difficult to foresee drivers ignoring the road completely while AI picks up the slack. Let’s take a deeper look into the key reasons why you’ll probably still be driving your self-driving car in the future. Across the world, the regulation of road traffic is treated with heavy levels of caution due to the level of risk that it comes with for all traffic. Europe, in particular, has plenty of red tape in place that holds back fully autonomous vehicles from transporting users from A to B without any form of monitoring. Most notably, the Vienna Convention on Road Traffic of 1968 in which all signatories of the Vienna Convention must abide, namely every EU state besides Spain who failed to ratify it, has understandably failed to take into account a future of autonomous vehicles.
