How Self-Driving Cars Could Make You Sick

From The Blaze.com (April 10):

As self-driving cars become a more tangible reality for the future of road travel, their ability to let riders do something other than pay attention to the road is one of the main draws. But one detail might have been slightly overlooked on this front and that’s the factor of motion sickness, a new study says.

Anyone who has been a passenger on a road trip and has tried to read while riding has probably experienced some level of queasiness.

Researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute surveyed more than 3,200 adults from six countries, including the U.S., about the types of activities they would do instead of driving in an autonomous car. More than a third said they would do things like read, text, watch movies, play games and work, a news release about the study stated. [read more]

Basically when cars drive themselves the driver becomes a passenger which allow him to look around and site see and not pay attention to the road. I am not sure it is a good idea to have the car totally autonomous though. Since self-driving cars are made by people and people are imperfect then self-driving cars will be too. A human should still be able to take control of the car if the cars goes out of control. What about ice, snow or even a downpour of rain? The car could hydroplane. I suppose a builder can put in sensors to handle that.  And what about driving around mountain roads? Can an owner trust a self-driving car to do that safely?

Then there is the issue of some malicious computer person hacking into the car’s program.  And then there are viruses and worms. The car owner would definitely want to keep your car’s software up to date.  If the car is going to use some sort of speech-to-text software to tell it its destination it better be really accurate or have someway for the user to input the destination.

Finally, Glenn Beck on his radio show brought up an interesting point. If self-driving cars become the norm will driver’s ed still be taught? And will the gov’t outlaw non-self-driving cars because they think self-driving cars are safer on the road? Surely race cars and demolition derby cars won’t be self-driving because that would be really boring.