
AVs have the chance to make mobility far more accessible to many more groups.
AVs have the chance to make mobility far more accessible to many more groups.
This year has seen steady movement towards a new age of automobility. Headlines celebrated the introduction of Tesla’s Autopilot system. We experienced the first widespread vehicle recall due to hacking vulnerabilities. The underlying ethics of algorithms being written for autonomous vehicles were discussed.
California has recently become the third state to legalize the use of self-driving vehicles. The new vehicles were created by Google, and are currently being tested for regulations and safety standards in Florida, Nevada, and California. Google proposes that the self-driving car will be on the market within the next 5 years. But what does this mean for disabled drivers?
These driverless cars could potentially provide a level of freedom for all disabled motorists, especially those suffering from vision impairments. Also, disabled parking issues could be a thing of the past, since these new rides would be able to drop off the passenger at the front of the venue, and park itself elsewhere.
A common concern is the potential safety of the vehicle. Google insists that due to the lack of human error, the computers responsible for driving the cars will never get fatigued or distracted. The cars have already been tested on over 300,000 miles of road without a single incident occurring.