Are we ready to replace personal cars with autonomous vehicles?
Option A:
Read Allison Arieff’s “Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That” and support or refute her contention that self-driving cars are not the solution to traffic dangers.
Pros and Cons in a Nutshell
Pro: People are terrible drivers prone to error and distractions, so in terms of raw numbers people will always create fatal accidents more than Teslas.
Con: But here’s the psychological hurdle: In a self-driving car, you lose control. You don’t surrender control only.
Con: You also surrender information. All of your driving is “looked at.”
You are also susceptible to hacking.
Con: Current costs of autonomous vehicles are too expensive to scale.
From the 2020 article “Are self-driving cars safe for our cities?” by Alissa Walker
Two Arguments Against Autonomous Vehicles
Some argue the safety record for self-driving cars isn’t proven, and that it’s unclear whether or not enough testing miles have been driven in real-life conditions. Other safety advocates go further, and say that driverless cars are introducing a new problem to cities, when cities should instead be focusing on improving transit and encouraging walking and biking instead.
Not sure widespread variety of self-driving cars is an argument:
Contentions aside, the autonomous revolution is already here, although some cities will see its impacts sooner than others. From Las Vegas, where a Navya self-driving minibus scoots slowly along a downtown street, to General Motors’ Cruise ride-hailing service in San Francisco with backup humans in the driver’s seat, to Waymo’s family-focused Chandler, Arizona–based pilot program that uses no human operators in its Chrysler Pacifica minivans at all, the country is accelerating towards a driverless future.
Why Autonomous Vehicles Cars Are Safer
Can autonomous cars drive better than humans?
The biggest safety advantage to an autonomous vehicle is that a robot is not a human—it is programmed to obey all the rules of the road, won’t speed, and can’t be distracted by a text message flickering onto a phone. And, hypothetically at least, AVs can also detect what humans can’t—especially at night or in low-light conditions—and react more quickly to avoid a collision.
AVs are laden with sensors and software that work together to build a complete picture of the road. One key technology for AVs is LIDAR, or a “light-detecting and ranging” sensor. Using millions of lasers, LIDAR draws a real-time, 3D image of the environment around the vehicle. In addition to LIDAR, radar sensors can measure the size and speed of moving objects. And high-definition cameras can actually read signs and signals. As the car is traveling, it cross-references all this data with GPS technology that situates the vehicle within a city and helps to plan its route.
In addition to the sensors and maps, AVs run software programs which make real-time decisions about how the car will navigate relative to other vehicles, humans, or objects in the road. Engineers can run the cars through simulations, but the software also needs to learn from actual driving situations. This is why real-world testing on public roads is so important.
But how AV companies gather that information has led to greater concerns about how autonomous vehicles can detect and avoid vulnerable road users, like cyclists, and people who move slowly and more erratically through streets, like seniors and children. Waymo, for example, claims its software has been explicitly programmed to recognize cyclists. A video that Waymo released in 2016 (back when it was still part of Google) shows how one of its vehicles detected and stopped for a wrong-way cyclist coming around a corner at night.
Benefits of Autonomous Vehicles:
Will eliminating human drivers reduce traffic deaths?
50 years ago, the U.S.’s rate of traffic deaths was higher than they are now—in 1980, generally considered to be the deadliest year on U.S. streets, over 50,000 people were killed. With safety features like airbags added to vehicles, stricter seat belt laws, and campaigns that stigmatized drunk driving, the rate of deaths went down significantly.
But over the last few years, the U.S. has seen a slight increase in traffic deaths again. Additionally, pedestrian fatalities increased by 27 percent over the last decade, while all other traffic fatalities decreased by 14 percent. There isn’t agreement for why these deaths are increasing, but some experts believe that this is because Americans are driving more—overall vehicle-miles traveled (VMT) reached an all-time high in 2017.
Using USDOT’s claim that 94 percent of crashes are caused by human error, it seems like a fairly obvious way to reduce crashes is to reduce the number of humans behind the wheel. But it’s not just the number of human drivers that should be reduced, the U.S. could also reduce the number of cars on roads to prevent fatalities—and autonomous vehicles might be able to help do that, too.
The real safety promise of autonomous vehicles is the fact that these vehicles can be be summoned on-demand, routed more efficiently, and easily shared—meaning not just the overall number of single-passenger cars on streets will decline, but the number of single-passenger trips will be reduced, meaning a reduction in overall miles traveled.
In addition, cities can use automated vehicles to tackle ambitious on-demand transit projects, like a proposed initiative to integrate shared self-driving vehicles into the public transit fleet. If cities can launch these kind of “microtransit” systems that serve as a first-mile/last-mile solution to help get more people to fixed-route public transportation, that will also mean fewer people in cars and more people on safer modes of transit. According to a 2016 American Public Transportation Association study, traveling by public transportation is ten times safer per mile than traveling by car.
Without having to make room for so many cars, city streets can be narrowed, making even more room for pedestrians and bikes to safely navigate cities. In this way, autonomous vehicles have a great role to play as part of a Vision Zero strategy, which most major U.S. cities have implemented in order to eliminate traffic deaths.
You can consult “7 Arguments Against the Autonomous-Vehicle Utopia” by Alexis C. Madrigal.
Here are 5 of the 7 Arguments:
One, AVs lack human smarts for real-life on-the-spot irregularities, like a drunk person bolting across the street.
Two, AVs can get hacked.
Three, AVs are too expensive for private ownership, and AVs are too expensive to make money for the companies that lend the cars to the public.
Four, Even if the car companies have 99% safety success, the 1% failure rate, or even .001% failure rate could expose them to liability that would bankrupt them.
Five, The AV will eventually have the safety and cost effectiveness necessary to scale, but this won’t happen for decades.
Suggested Outline:
Introduction, use an attention-getter such as the AV Tesla that involved the death of a pedestrian.
Thesis, pose the question if the AV is superior mode of transportation to our current personal car ownership, and then provide the answer with 4 pieces of evidence you will use throughout the body paragraphs of your essays.
Body Paragraphs
Counterargument-Rebuttal: Be sure to anticipate your opponents’ most pressing objections.
Conclusion: powerful restatement of your thesis.
Sample Thesis:
While I concede that there will come a time when autonomous vehicles replace personal car ownership, the current legal, safety, and technological obstacles make this transition something we won’t see for at least a couple of decades.
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