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Self-driving cars, just around the market corner, will make drivers redundant and roads less dangerous. But how will they affect the economy?
by Robert G. Parker
ICTURE THIS: YOU’RE DRIVING TO WORK, responding to and sending emails, reviewing the presentation you’ll soon be making and looking out your window every now and again to take in the countryside on the conges- tion-free commute downtown. Once you arrive, you dispatch your driv- erless car back home to take the kids to school before sending it off
to collect your parents and drive them to their doctors’ appointments. Or, if you’re entrepreneurial, you can put it to work by sending it to a pool of self-driving cars where anyone can call up and pay you a fee to use it before it returns to your office and brings you home. This is not the stuff of science fiction anymore. It’s happening. In fact, self-driving
cars will be here a lot sooner than most people think because the technologies needed to fully automate driving are coming onstream. Within three months every Tesla vehicle will be capable of driving down highways automatically, unassisted by humans. In 2013, Mercedes test-drove an autonomous S 500 through 100 kilometres of city and highway. GM’s Super Cruise technology will keep a car in its lane at a safe distance from other vehicles, adjust steering and apply the brakes. It will also “talk to” similarly equipped vehicles and share speed and road condition information. Governments have been busy, too. The UK national budget for 2015 has dedicated
£100 million ($180 million) for autonomous vehicle development. This year, four cities in the UK will host driverless vehicle trials, including testing a 10-passenger autonomous electric shuttle. Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation has partnered with the Ontario Centres of Excellence to create the $1-million Connected Vehicle/
28 | CPA MAGAZINE | JUNE/JULY 2015
Test drive: Google chairman Eric Schmidt in one of the company’s self-driving cars
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
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