Driverless Car Essay

610 Words2 Pages

Besides the political and legal influences the driverless car technology will have on the government, the economic considerations for implementing the technology and for having adopted the technology should be evaluated on the micro and macro scale. The micro scale involves how actually getting the driverless technology on the road will affect the owners of the technology’s pocket books. The bottom line, how much will a vehicle of this type cost to own? The macroeconomics involves how GDP and jobs creation/reduction due to this technology will impact the U.S. economy. As with most new technologies, the driverless car technology is expensive. In order for this new technology to work properly and safely, driverless car manufacturers are using a combination of advanced technologies. Some of these technologies are sonar devices, stereo cameras, lasers and radar (Priddle & Woodyard, 2012). These technologies are used to detect objects, whether the objects are other cars, people or stationary objects, so that the vehicle can know the distance, direction and speed of these different objects (Whitwam, 1996-2014). The Google driverless car incorporates …show more content…

Many sources, in the research completed for this paper, agree that accidents will decrease when driverless technology is wholly accepted. If a reduction in accidents is in fact realized due to driverless car technology, the economic impact of decreased accidents could be significant. The National Safety Council states that the economic cost of vehicular deaths in 2012 was $1,410,000 per death. The National Safety Council defines this cost as “wage and productivity losses, medical expenses, administrative expenses, motor vehicle damage, and employers’ uninsured costs” (NSC,

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