The Driverless Era

Monday, came a five-star article with the Wall Street Journal (my favorite daily paper)...."How do you ensure a driverless automobile?"

The issue is that we are quietly progressing almost weekly toward the day that one state will approve full-use of a driverless truck/car/delivery vehicle.

Insurance companies are kinda quiet on this.  I suspect they hope that a decade or two will go by before this actually happens.  They need more data....more information....more accident reports....to come to some mythical number that says something about fate and a driverless car.

Imagine the first driverless car accident in Texas.  Some driver will yell and scream as a Texas cop drives up.....a driverless car hit him.  He'll try to blame everything possible in ten minutes on the other vehicle.  Eventually, the cop will download the video and data from the driverless car.....basically showing the human at fault.  The guy will sue in local court.....finding that the local judge can't agree with him either.

Two years into the driverless era in one state.....it'll spread to other states, and be accepted nationwide within five years (I'll go ahead and  predict New York state is the last state to accept them....meaning an end to the human-driven taxi force of New York City).

Total accidents in the first two years of use?  I'll make a prediction it'll be around the normal number of accidents.....but a strange thing will occur with video and data collected.  Cops will come to agree almost down to one-hundred-percent of cases.....that it was the other driver that triggered the accident.

The driverless car?  It automatically slowed down in bad weather.  It came to a complete stop when the air temperature and humidity reached the point of possible ice.  Tired-driver syndrome?  Ended.  Drunk-driving accidents?  Ended.

Somewhere in this five-year period of introduction.....I'll predict that insurance companie come to a shocking realization.....a standard of $100 a year will be introduced...mostly because they can't find fault in the data, systems, or programming.  When asked why $100 works.....they won't be able to respond.....other than saying they had to charge something.  Profits for the insurance companies?  It'll start to be questioned.

By 2025, I expect one state to accept driverless vehicles....related to the delivery trade.  Eleven years away?  Yeah.  For some reason, I see legal challenges coming up continually and keeping the idea from being adopted early on.  It just won't be easy for any US culture or society to accept it.  It might even show up in the UK before the US.

Yeah....a radical change to our lifestyles.....letting Ford or BMW drive us.