Journal #6 Yorick

Chris Urmson is head of engineering for Google’s Self-Driving Car Project which aims at designing automated cars using in the future. In Chris Urmson’s article, he pointed out some importance of self-driving vehicles. He believed that self-driving vehicles can reduce the traffic accidents and congestion. Because sometimes drivers may feel tired, and fatigue driving is a main factor causing traffic accidents. A self-driving vehicle can perfectly avoid such a situation only if the sensor keep working all the time. They can also help those who are not able to drive by themselves to get around.  

Although self-driving vehicles have so much benefits, it is not an easy task to design them. Sometimes vehicles are not under control even if they are manipulated by human, so it is difficult to make a car move around, stop and slow down by a set of sensors. It may not be sensitive to the upcoming accidents, in this case, this makes self-driving vehicles as a dangerous means of transportation. Another challenge is that these cars need a kind of technology to guide them to the target place. Engineers cannot guarantee that these cars will not make mistakes which will lead us to a wrong location. It needs the car have another system that they can change from automatic mode to manual mode.

If self-driving vehicles which are not so sensitive to the environment are not well designed, I am definitely not willing to have this car or want my family drive them. But the whole project is still working on how to improve the sensors to make it functional that they can have a quite reaction to deal with the abrupt changes. If self-driving vehicles are considered to be much more safe and well-designed, I can accept driving to somewhere in such a car.