Are Car Accidents Going to Become A Thing Of The Past?

According to the Wall Street Journal's Monday section, "Innovations in Transportation", the average licensed driver covers 12,700 miles each year, spends about 18 and one-half hours in the car each week and cannot stop being distracted when they drive.  18% of all injury accidents involve distracted drivers.  Moreover about $300 billion dollars is the approximate costs associated with automobile accidents.

And the average time a driver's eyes are off the road is 4.6 seconds.  Lets do the math.  A car travels one and one-half its miles per hour in feet per second.  So, if I am going 50 mph, I am going 75 feet per second.  If I am going 60 miles per hour I am going 90 feet per second.  So, when a person texts, they are travelling almost, on average, 375 feet along the highway, only they are not looking at the highway!  That is fifteen feet more than a football field plus the end zones of the football field.

Coming down the road, surprisingly soon, is the "driverless car".  According to Dan Neil, the automotive critic for the Wall Street Journal, "BMW's TrackTrainer -- an experimental 330i sedan bristling with machine-vision equipment -- uses GPS, track maps and telemetry recorded during a professional driver's model lap to negotiate a racecourse.  "

In his article, Neil opines, "By the time this technology is commercialized, robotically operated cars will be safer, probably a lot safer, than manually operated cars.  Autopilots will never get distracted, sleepy, lost, angry.  There reactions will be instantaneous and in an emergency always the right one.  They will always signal when changing lanes, never tailgate."  So that means that the people who will continue to drive manually operated cars will be less safe.  I wonder how long it will be, then, before the government REQUIRES the use of the driverless car.

Apparently, these cars are inevitable.  About 68% of those polled thought that the driverless cars were a good idea while only 31% felt that the "driverless car" was a bad idea all the way around. 

My wife, however, claims to have already experienced a "driverless car" -- every time I am behind the wheel!