The Road to Driverless Cars -- Safety Systems
One unique characteristic of autonomous vehicles is their potential to be safer than the mode they replace. Cars today are safer than ever, but their use still results in over 35,000 deaths a year in the U.S. alone. Safety systems are now becoming available with the potential to mitigate the results of driver error, and avoid some accidents entirely. Advanced safety systems - lane departure warnings, collisions alerts, even direct accident avoidance - are finding their way into an increasing number of luxury and even mid-price vehicles. At this point most of these features are optional and rely on consumers to value them highly enough to pay more.This is reminiscent of the of the early stages of the process that saw the adoption of passive safety systems such as airbags and ABS. Consumer interest may lead to active safety features being adopted, perhaps more quickly than ABS and airbags, which had minimal adoption rates early in their introduction (even thou...