Evaluative Statement

Autonomous cars have been touted as the near future for over half a century.
There have been many technological advances recently that have made fully autonomous
cars closer to a reality. Throughout our research, Autonomy has focused on investigating
and discovering the safety controversies of these cars, including the possibilities of hacking
and the reliability of the vehicles ability to map its environment. At this point in time, we
believe that autonomous cars are not safe for widespread public use. There are many
safety concerns dealing with the technology of how the vehicles works, as well as other
concerns about ethics, economics, and government processes.
Throughout the years, there have been many attempts to build autonomous
vehicles. Only recently has there been a multitude of manufacturers in the race to create
the first fully autonomous car available to the general public. With companies like Tesla,
Waymo, and Uber at the forefront of development, there is worry that there may be
unintended safety consequences in the rush to be first.
Because autonomous cars are relatively new, the technology is still in the process of
being developed. From our research, we found that autonomous cars face safety issues
that put autonomous cars out of the question as a feasible option in making our roads a
safer place.
With the way the current transportation infrastructure is set up, autonomous cars
will have to share the same roads as non-autonomous cars. Current autonomous
technology takes this situation into account through the use of Mapping and Localization.
By mapping out cities beforehand and creating metadata-infused satellite images,
autonomous cars are becoming safer in a mix of autonomous and non-autonomous
vehicles. However human drivers are too unpredictable for autonomous cars to take into
account all of the different scenarios that it may encounter. Therefore, no matter how
much autonomous cars are seen to improve the safety on the road, there will be situations
that autonomous cars are not programmed to handle. Thus, in addition to improving the
sensors and algorithms of the autonomous car, there will most likely be a need to create a
separation between autonomous cars and non-autonomous cars. This can mean changing
the city infrastructure and creating roads or lanes that are dedicated to only autonomous
cars.

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 Hacking of autonomous cars is also a concern. Because autonomous cars are
usually connected cars, they rely on internet access to navigate. However, by using the
internet, autonomous cars face the risk of being hacked. Car manufacturers have a long
history of improving the safety of cars but they are relatively new to considering the
network security of cars. Since they do not have expertise in security, it is fairly easy for
attackers to hack the cars system. To combat attacks, one company called Waymo is
developing an autonomous car that is mostly offline.This is a practical solution to prevent
hackers from taking control of autonomous cars and endangering the lives of people on
the roads. However, by taking autonomous cars offline, the car cannot rely on features that
require internet access such as vehicle-to-vehicle communication, which would significantly
decreases the safety of the cars. Therefore, with the current security status of autonomous
cars, they cannot be considered very safe.
In the course of our research we also found several other reasons that we believe
that autonomous cars are not ready for public use. These include ethics, economics, and
the undertakings of an entire infrastructure change. Although these are not directly related
to safety, they would have repercussions on the general public and factor into our
evaluation of autonomous vehicles.
One of the biggest ethical controversies surrounding autonomous cars is who the
algorithms will decide to kill in a scenario where loss of life is inevitable. These cars will
have to be programmed to prioritize the safety of its own passengers versus other people,
in vehicles or as pedestrians, within its environment. The safety of these two groups, those
inside the car and those outside the car, would be in the hands of those programming the
algorithms. Although, the question of whether the car should be able to make a moral
judgement is out of scope of our project, we can conclude that the safety of either the
passengers or the civilians would be in jeopardy.
There is also the question of economic safety. The manufacturing and rollout of a
society that is sustained on autonomous vehicles would have less need for cars. Less cars
on the road mean less cars being manufactured, and thus a loss of jobs. There are also
other industries that would suffer under an autonomous car society - taxi drivers, traffic
police, etc.. The livelihoods of these people would be put at risk with the addition of
automation.
Cities would also have to undergo vast infrastructure and regulation change to
support the transition to autonomous vehicles. There are many ways that the
infrastructure of cities would have to change to accommodate the vehicles, especially in the
transition period. First, there would have to be the introduction of dedicated lanes to

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account for them. Autonomous vehicles wouldnt require traffic lights to signal
intersections. Cities would also have to factor in how pedestrians would signal to the
vehicles that they were crossing the road. New regulations would also have to be enacted.
In case of an accident, autonomous vehicles would change the definition of who the
driver at fault is. Lawmakers would have to figure out how to navigate this issue and the
consequences of an autonomous reckless driver.
All of these infrastructure and regulation issues are compounded by the fact that
government is slow to change. With manufacturers wanting these new autonomous
vehicles on the road within ten years, there is no way that our cities will be able to make
the necessary changes in time.
At this moment, our research group concludes that the risks and safety
consequences of fully autonomous cars outweigh the safety benefits that they would bring.
The technology is not at the level that it needs to be to for us to confidently promote its
use. The algorithms need to be improved to be able to better handle the irrationality of
human beings, companies need to start prioritizing security, and governments must
prepare for the transition to autonomous vehicles. That being said, our research group
believes that there is an inevitable point in the far future where autonomous vehicles will
become the norm.