Self-Driving Cars

Whenever I think about the idea of driverless cars, I always imagine explorers that lived hundreds of years ago and who were attempting to create ink and paper maps of the new worlds that they had discovered. I think of this because of the unfathomable amount of mapped data that has had to be collected for even the idea of driverless cars to be realized, mapping not only entire cities but every single square inch of that city’s roads. What would Louis and Clark have said if we told them there were people who drove around cars that took pictures of everything and everywhere and created a real-life map of our world? They’d probably say: “what’s a car?”

This is all in the wake of Lyft making the announcement yesterday that they’ll be rolling out their first batch of driverless cars to begin testing on. Lyft has partnered with a company called nuTonomy, which could give them the biggest edge on their competitors if the first rollout is successful.

In another major partnership, Honda just announced yesterday that it has come together with a Chinese startup called SenseTime. This company is best known for its object recognition technology and artificial intelligence, and this merger is indicative of Honda’s intentions to provide self-driving cars by 2020. Their focus in buying this company is to gain knowledge on “risk prediction, action planning, and scene understanding” to better serve urban areas with safe cars.

I’m interested to see how well they are able to achieve this, in assessing risk when it comes to such a human endeavor like driving. Driving and vehicles isn’t exactly a social issue, and I think analyzing data for risks in driving will yield better results than attempts to translate speech and tone from huge databases into concrete and meaningful output and answers. With so many companies announcing their intentions to roll out their own version of the self-driving car, I’m curious to see how long it will be before I myself ride in one. Maggie Wilcoxon