By Dale McFeatters
Enjoy driving your car now. You may not be doing it much longer. The driverless car is here.
Gov. Jerry Brown has given the go-ahead for self-driving cars on a test basis in California, our largest and most auto-addicted state and incubator of national trends. The caveat is that a human with a license to drive must be in the driver's seat.
The technology for driverless cars is already here ― radar sensors, laser range finders, video, GPS and the computer capacity to pull it altogether. Commutes will be faster and safer because the car can communicate with other cars and traffic monitors, decreasing congestion.
The driverless car does not drink, experience road rage, get lost in strange neighborhoods, drive recklessly and leaves the titular drivers free to do all the things ― text, eat, primp, talk on the cellphone, gawk at the scenery, use the laptop or the car's entertainment center ― they would rather do than drive the car.
This seems blasphemy to anyone who came of age in the 1950s and '60s, but increasingly for young Americans cars are no longer a symbol of freedom, a rite of passage. According to a University of Michigan study, more than 30 percent of Americans ages 17 to 19 do not have a driver's license, up from 12.7 percent in 1983.
And the driverless car is the answer to a problem that has bedeviled auto safety specialists ― the fast-rising number of accidents, with accompanying deaths and injuries, caused by distracted driving.
The Wall Street Journal devoted a special report to driverless cars in which writer Dan Neil concluded, "Twenty-five years from now, piloting one's own vehicle will seem weirdly anachronistic and unnecessary, like riding a mule to the mall." At the speed which driverless technology is developing, that may be on the conservative side.
It has long been said among automotive engineers that the most unreliable and dangerous part in a car is the nut behind the wheel. After more than a century of automotive development, we may finally have solved that problem.
Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service.
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