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Driverless Cars: Pros & Cons

With driverless cars set to take to public roads in the UK as soon as January, it’s time to find out what driverless cars really are, how they work and what their future holds. The idea of a self-driving car hit headlines back in May, when Google announced they had been working on developing a car which could drive itself. Since then, driverless cars have already been allowed on public roads in the USA, Japan and Sweden.

In June 2014, it was announced that the British government was rewriting The Highway Code to allow for driverless cars, and that driverless cars would soon be tested in the UK on public roads. 3 cities in the UK will be chosen to host the driverless car trials and will each win a share of £10m to cover their expenses.

How do driverless cars work?

It’s similar to how planes can be put on autopilot mode. Thanks to technological advances, driverless cars will be able to take control of steering, accelerating, indicating, braking, cruise control, anti-lane drift, self-parking for most of and sometimes all of a journey. Using highly technological systems such as sensors, computer vision, GPS and Lidar – a remote sensing technology that can measure distances by illuminating a target with a laser and analysing the reflected light – the cars will be able to get you from A to B without you needing to do anything at all.

Pros

There are several pros expected to come from the general use of self-driving cars by the public:

Cons

As well as pros, there are some cons of using self-driving cars that are expected to emerge:

Until driverless cars are present in our everyday general life, there’s no exact way of telling what effect they’ll have. So watch this space and look out for the changing face of driving in the UK and the rest of the world.

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