What is Autonomous Vehicles?

(This answer is taken from my book ‘Innovate the Next: Success Frameworks to Innovating Products in Any Revolution’). An autonomous vehicle, or self-driving car, is a car that can sense its environment and safely drive you to the next point.

They use sensors, GPS, artificial intelligence and other technologies to perceive their environment so as to move safely.

They have to be safer than human driving. They rely on data gathering so as to perceive an environment correctly. The more they drive in a particular area, the better they get at driving in that area.

This technology is still not fully fledged in the world; however, it is fast improving and will eventually take over. Laws to regulate it still need to be adopted in many parts of the world.

Tesla cars have autonomous driving.

The probable benefits are many, and so are the counter arguments.

One price benefit is insurance. If you are not driving, then your driver profile does not need to be insured. If autonomous vehicles drive safely, then it means you need less insurance. Their intelligence is shared via the cloud with other autonomous vehicles and so safe driving improvements go way up.

If my car drives safely, then I can rent it out to drive other people while I am at work. I can therefore make money from my car. Or maybe I don’t even need to own a car.

Those are just some of the possibilities of this present future.

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Click here for the explanations of the other components of the 4IR (5G, Quantum Computing, Biotechnology, Autonomous Vehicles, 3D Printing, Decentralised Consensus, Iot, Nanotechnology, AI And Robotics).

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‘Innovate the Next’ is available on Amazon, on Takealot.com and in all South African bookstores.