Are driverless cars the future of transportation?
What do you think about driverless cars? Would you ride in one? Why or why not? Do you think they are the way of the future?
In “Stuck on the Streets of San Francisco in a Driverless Car,” the Times technology reporter Cade Metz went for a ride in the back seat of an experimental autonomous vehicle and wrote about his experience:
It was about 9 p.m. on a cool Tuesday evening in San Francisco this month when I hailed a car outside a restaurant a few blocks from Golden Gate Park.
A few minutes later, as I waited at a stoplight, a white Mercedes pulled up next to me. Three teenagers were sitting on the edges of its open windows, their heads bobbing above the roof. One of them pointed at the empty front seat of my car.
“Who’s driving?” he yelled.
“No one,” I yelled back.
I was riding in a driverless car operated by Cruise, a company backed by General Motors that is now offering low-cost rides to a limited number of lucky and notably brave people in San Francisco. For a good decade now, a number of companies have been promising that, in just a few years, driverless cars that can be hailed with the tap of an app will hit city streets. Those few years, it seems, are always a few more years. And, as these companies struggle to perfect their vehicles, I can’t help but wonder if they’ll ever actually turn their work into viable businesses given the enormous cost of building and operating the cars.
Our car that evening, a small Chevy Bolt with a roof rack full of sensors, changed lanes on its own. It waited for pedestrians and their dogs to amble past before accelerating through a crosswalk. It wove around cars parked in the middle of the street with their hazard lights blinking.
Remember the iconic, tire-squealing chase scene in “Bullitt,” the Steve McQueen movie from the 1960s? Now, imagine the opposite, and you’ll have a sense of how the car cautiously drove up and down San Francisco’s hills, gingerly navigated four-way stops and angled around double-parked cars.
Still, even for someone like me — a reporter who has spent a fair amount of time with this kind of technology over the past few years — riding through a major city in a car without a driver was an eye-opener. Not to say there weren’t issues. As the car passed the joyriding teenagers a second time, it swerved sharply to the right, presumably because it mistook them for pedestrians. At another intersection, it hit the brakes just as the light changed to red, skidding to a stop in the middle of a crosswalk, its nose sticking out into the intersection. A pedestrian yelled at my robot driver and flipped it off as he walked by. I couldn’t say if that was more or less satisfying than flipping off a human.
Students, read the entire article and watch the embedded videos, then tell us:
Would you want to ride in a driverless car? Why or why not? Did reading the article change your views in any way? What did you think when you watched the videos of Mr. Metz’s ride through San Francisco? Did you think, “Cool, I want to do that!” or, “No way”? What do you see as the benefits of driverless cars for passengers, pedestrians and society at large? What are the possible downsides and dangers? Do you think the positives outweigh the drawbacks? What questions do you have about driverless cars?
After reading the article, do you think that driverless cars are the future of transportation? Why or why not? If so, when do you think they will be common features in our daily life?
What is your dream mode of transportation in the future? A jetpack? Hovercraft? Moving sidewalks? Teleportation? Do you think your fantasy will ever turn into a reality?
In “Stuck on the Streets of San Francisco in a Driverless Car,” the Times technology reporter Cade Metz went for a ride in the back seat of an experimental autonomous vehicle and wrote about his experience:
It was about 9 p.m. on a cool Tuesday evening in San Francisco this month when I hailed a car outside a restaurant a few blocks from Golden Gate Park.
A few minutes later, as I waited at a stoplight, a white Mercedes pulled up next to me. Three teenagers were sitting on the edges of its open windows, their heads bobbing above the roof. One of them pointed at the empty front seat of my car.
“Who’s driving?” he yelled.
“No one,” I yelled back.
I was riding in a driverless car operated by Cruise, a company backed by General Motors that is now offering low-cost rides to a limited number of lucky and notably brave people in San Francisco. For a good decade now, a number of companies have been promising that, in just a few years, driverless cars that can be hailed with the tap of an app will hit city streets. Those few years, it seems, are always a few more years. And, as these companies struggle to perfect their vehicles, I can’t help but wonder if they’ll ever actually turn their work into viable businesses given the enormous cost of building and operating the cars.
Our car that evening, a small Chevy Bolt with a roof rack full of sensors, changed lanes on its own. It waited for pedestrians and their dogs to amble past before accelerating through a crosswalk. It wove around cars parked in the middle of the street with their hazard lights blinking.
Remember the iconic, tire-squealing chase scene in “Bullitt,” the Steve McQueen movie from the 1960s? Now, imagine the opposite, and you’ll have a sense of how the car cautiously drove up and down San Francisco’s hills, gingerly navigated four-way stops and angled around double-parked cars.
Still, even for someone like me — a reporter who has spent a fair amount of time with this kind of technology over the past few years — riding through a major city in a car without a driver was an eye-opener. Not to say there weren’t issues. As the car passed the joyriding teenagers a second time, it swerved sharply to the right, presumably because it mistook them for pedestrians. At another intersection, it hit the brakes just as the light changed to red, skidding to a stop in the middle of a crosswalk, its nose sticking out into the intersection. A pedestrian yelled at my robot driver and flipped it off as he walked by. I couldn’t say if that was more or less satisfying than flipping off a human.
Students, read the entire article and watch the embedded videos, then tell us:
Would you want to ride in a driverless car? Why or why not? Did reading the article change your views in any way? What did you think when you watched the videos of Mr. Metz’s ride through San Francisco? Did you think, “Cool, I want to do that!” or, “No way”? What do you see as the benefits of driverless cars for passengers, pedestrians and society at large? What are the possible downsides and dangers? Do you think the positives outweigh the drawbacks? What questions do you have about driverless cars?
After reading the article, do you think that driverless cars are the future of transportation? Why or why not? If so, when do you think they will be common features in our daily life?
What is your dream mode of transportation in the future? A jetpack? Hovercraft? Moving sidewalks? Teleportation? Do you think your fantasy will ever turn into a reality?
