Driverless Cars?
An interesting story in Forbes magazine discusses a partnership between General Motors and Carnegie Mellon University. The five year, $5 million dollar agreement will advance research on cars that can drive themselves. As the labs co-director, Raj Rajkumar says “Research at the lab will focus on ‘creating and maturing the underlying technologies required to build the autonomous vehicle of the future.”
The benefits of this technology go far beyond being able to eat breakfast on your way to work without having to steer your car, as many environmental challenges can be answered by autonomous vehicles. An autonomous vehicle could reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles by a substantial amount for two reasons, peak fuel efficiency and lighter weight.
A vehicle that drives itself would be programmed to accelerate, drive and coast at the optimal rate for fuel efficient performance. An autonomous car would never waste fuel through rapid acceleration, speeding on roadways or idling while in traffic as computer systems will not allow for this. This could result in double digit fuel economy increases based on efficient operation alone.
Currently reductions in automobile weight can lead to more serious accidents as passengers are forced to absorb more impact when lighter vehicles have collisions. As accidents would become extremely unlikely if all cars on the road were driven using computing systems, the vehicle could conceivably be made out of very lightweight material. This would result in amazing fuel efficiency increases without adopting engine technology more advanced than current combustion engines.
Last year GM sponsored Carnegie Mellon’s Tartan Racing team, which won the Pentagon’s DARPA prize. The event requires an autonomous vehicle to drive more than 50 miles on a course with various twists and turns. Hopefully GM’s renewed investment will bring this technology closer to use on America’s roads.
