Introduction

An autonomous car is a robotic vehicle that is capable of sensing the environment

and navigating without a constant hands-on control by a human operator being
required, in short driverless car. Autonomous car senses the surrounding by using
techniques such as radar, Global Positioning System (GPS), lidar and computer
vision. To sum thing up, autonomous car is a type of vehicle that is able to use the
sensory input to update its maps and keep the car track of its position when
conditions change or when it enters undiscovered environment.

According to the data published by World Health Organization (WHO) in May 2014,
the road traffic accident deaths in Malaysia had reached a peak.

There are 6,813 deaths or equivalent to 5.36% of the total deaths. Malaysia has
rank 34 in the world which has an age adjusted death rate of 25.25 per 100,000 of
population. These deaths toll are alarming because we know that accidents are
expected to grow every year.

Doubtlessly, human error is the factor in most of the accidents. Failing to look
properly, being disturbed, misjudging other road users movements, hurrying in
crossing the road or careless are the most common causes of accidents on the
roads.

However, with the convergence of artificial intelligence with vehicle,

autonomous vehicle will not make these mistakes.

Imagine now you are able to fulfil the main transportation capabilities of a traditional
car, it is just like sitting on a plane, how will you spend your extra time? Meeting with
those assignments deadlines? Drinking a cup of coffee?
Watch the video to get to know more about autonomous car!

Our future with autonomous cars on the society

According to Factor-Tech.com (2015), autonomous car will be a very common

vehicle on the road in the year of 2025. This phenomenon will bring a big impact on
our current road traffic system, our relationship with cars and also our society
culture. Many companies in car industry have done the research on autonomous car.
For example, Volvo Cars company and Google Cars company have made a car
testing on the road to ensure that the autonomous cars can function perfectly in tune.
However, the decision of launching autonomous car is not only depends on the car
manufacture and even consumer, but it depends on the government because a new
law will be needed to implement to investigate for the autonomous car. Below are the
ways autonomous car will affect our future life:

Privacy of the car owner

An autonomous car is operated with GPS system and gadgets. The position, location
and where the driver stay will tied to the system and gadgets because the
autonomous car needs to know where the owner's next destination. So, if the system
had been hacked by someone, the driver privacy will be leak out and this will make
the car driver in danger because his/her location and next destination will easily
reveal to everyone especially the hacker. In contrast, there is an advantage of this
crime. Since an autonomous car has a GPS system, so we can detect the location of
our cars so that even someone stole our car, we can track them easily.

Renewable car will increase

The amount of cars in the cities will increase tremendously. With the evolution of
autonomous car, everyone can have their own car include the blind people or
disable. This will make their life easier and bring them freedom.

Car design will have big effect on roads.

Autonomous car concept is run with solar power, for example like Tesla's home
battery for the autonomous car is run with solar power system and it can store high
capacity of battery via solar power in house. It is a clean and renewable resource
that will not pollute our earth. Other than that, there will be a new technology which is
the wireless induction charging. The technology is run with a primary coil ferreted
away in your garage floor, a secondary coil is incorporated into the floor of the car,
and an alternating magnetic field charges the battery. This technology will make our
roads and parking place to have a big change due to the need to install the solar
panel pavilion in order to charge our cars.

Effect on government enforcement

The autonomous car will bring more benefits for the government enforcement
department. The autonomous car will control their speed based on the road situation.
The law of speed limit and speeding can be repeal due to the autonomous car can
lead to a safer condition for the roads user and the traffic system. Other than that,
autonomous car also will decrease the case of drunken driving and decrease the
percentage of accident. Instead of supervise the situation of road system through
CCTV, the government enforcement can give more attention on other duties.

Below is a video about how autonomous car will affect our future:

Factors affecting demand & cost

Autonomous car will be coming into the market in the future thus affecting the
demand for transport. The introduction of the autonomous driving will also affect the
cost of transportation. There are factors that will affect the cost and demand on
transport like changing human preferences, Intelligent Transport System (ITS),
planning innovations, price changes, improved travel options and also demographic
trends (Litman, 2015).
Changing human preferences on transportation can be affected with the introduction
of autonomous driving. Autonomous driving will help pilot the car without the driver
thus making people drive less as the car would do all the job. Thus demand for
transportation from public transport will reduce. The autonomous car can increase
the amount of people car pulling then before and also have an increase in people
walking or cycling to their destination as the cost of owning an autonomous car can
be very high.

The other factor that will affect transport demand and cost is Intelligent Transport
System (ITS). Intelligent transport System (ITS) is a system to help improve
transportation in terms of performance, safety, environmental sustainability and also
mobility by finding the best route possible (Vanajakshi, Ramadurai and Anand,
2010). The introduction of autonomous car can help improve the user information
system and navigation system in the ITS. Thus improving the demand for
autonomous cars. The effect on electronic pricing for the autonomous car would also
increase due to the high cost of the autonomous cars.

The next factor that will affect the demand and cost for transportation is improved
travel options. The introduction of autonomous driving, public transport can also use
this system thus making them to be more in schedule thus improving public
transportation. The improvement of public transportation making transportation
option to be much wider thus increasing the demand for transportation. As for the
industry providing delivery services would have a better delivery service.

The other factor that affects the demand and cost of transportation is demographic
trends. As now cars can drive by themselves providing a better option for the aging
population (Berk, 2014). As population age, they tend to not able to see well or
respond fast enough in case of an emergency thus autonomous driving can provide
a safer driving environment for the aging population. The cost of the autonomous
would be high thus is discourages people to own one. It will affect people working
lifestyle thus it is far cheaper to work from home. Thus reducing the demand for
transport as the cost is too high.

The price changes are also one of the factors. The increase of fuel prices would
affect the demand for transportation as autonomous cars will also still need to use
fuel like any other car in the market. The increase in fuel price will cause the
reduction in demand for transport as people would prefer to walk or cycle to their
destination.

The implementation of autonomous car can have a lot of effect on our current society
thus many preparations would be needed before it is launched. These are the factors
that will happen to the demand and cost of transportation with the implementation of
autonomous driving.

Advantages

1. Crash Elimination

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the road traffic accidents will
become the fifth leading cause of worldwide death by the year of 2030. As we have
discussed previously in the Introduction part, human errors were the most critical
factors in most of the accidents. Besides that, with estimated wealth rises in
developing countries and also with estimated young people increases in the future,
the number of cars and drivers are expected to rise as well.

Ultimately, the convergence will make the vehicle drive themselves and operate
autonomously. We understand that some of the drivers will not react at all in a critical
situation. They feel panic and not even step on the brakes. Autonomous cars drive
more defensively and much more consistent in their behaviour in critical situations as
they capable to break earlier in critical situations than humans, we can assume that
the average road traffic accident is likely to be significantly smaller than the average
damage caused.

2. Reduced Need for New Infrastructure

Convergence not only transforms future vehicles, but also the highway and road
systems. The roads are designed for human drivers, yet they are being too
distracted, inexperienced or aggressive. Therefore, todays roadway and supporting
infrastructure have to accommodate for the often-unpredictable movement patterns
of human-driven vehicles. However, autonomous cars do not require all these
because they will not make all these mistakes, thus tend to reduce the amount that
need to spend annually on the roads, highways and other infrastructure.

3. Productivity Improvement

Since they are autonomous vehicles, they are able to drive themselves. This offers
the travellers an opportunity to regain their time that previously focusing on driving.
The inefficiency of human-driven vehicles leads to considerable congestion at high
traffic volumes and frequent traffic jams. An autonomous vehicle will eliminate most
urban congestion and traffic jam, but also allow the travellers to make use of the
extra time that they have for other productive use because formerly the attention
must be given to driving.

Autonomous cars may be helped in recover all or part of our time because they are
designed to serve the needs of the travellers. We can now make use of the interior of
the car as a mobile office, rest station or even entertainment centre.

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Disadvantages

1. Expensive
Autonomous vehicles require advanced technologies to implement in the system. A
high cost is achieved in making investigation, design, testing and time. We assume
that the cost needed for engineering, power and computer requirements, software
and sensors in building an autonomous car add up to be more than $100,000. Since
autonomous cars use electronic sensors to sense the surrounding, government will
also need to bear a huge amount of money in setting up all these electronic sensors
on every road and highway.

2. Economic loss

Since autonomous vehicles are driverless car, meaning that they do not need a
driver to drive the car. Imagine autonomous vehicles were implemented everywhere,
it would be an economic tragedy because unemployment rate will definitely increase
as there will be no lorry drivers, bus drivers or other professional drivers needed.

3. Program error

We are able to do a lot of incredible thing with the successful programming, yet there
is always expected to be some unexpected flaw to happen. Since autonomous
vehicles depend heavily on GPS satellite, if any external and internal factors that
block the signal, the entire functionality of the car may be affected. Additional risks
will be introduced- system failure.

Effects on Autonomous industry

With the continuous advancement of the technology, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) is

no longer a dream or only can be seen in sci-fi movie. Therefore, by switching our
driving mode into an autonomous mode, there is definitely will be a huge impact that
will change the automotive industry. Nothing is free in this world, everything comes
with a price and are we ready for the AVs (Geiger, Lenz & Urtasun, 2015)
First of all, according to Mc Kinsey & Company, (2015) that will divide us into 3
different era. First, the era that AVs being developed for consumers, which is now.
Secondly, the early adoption of the AVs for customers, this will happen approximately
at 2030. Lastly, the one we all anticipated for long time, where the AVs become the
primary medium of transportation.

The first era, the players in the automotive industry will start to invest more of their
capital in research and development into autonomous driving technology in order to
making it reality. At this stage we could see that Self Driving version of Audi A7.
(Robbins, 2015) Besides, the world famous brand Mercedes also working on the
Mercedes F 015, an autonomous driving concept car without human drivers.
(Davies, 2015)

The second era, more consumers will start to adopt AVs on the road. Therefore, as
more consumers has adopted AVs, the demand for AV maintenance will definitely
increase as they are directly proportional. As AVs are still consider as new
technology at this point of time, consumer will prefer bring their AVs back to original
manufacturer for maintenance instead of choosing independent car workshop. This
is a serious threat to the independent car workshop that does not have the specialist
on servicing AVs, workshops business will definitely affected. Not only that, car
insurance company will need to change their coverage area as well. For now, car
insurer provides coverage for accident that caused by human error, with alienation of
the AVs, insurers will have to transform their business core model that mainly target
on car manufacturer by protecting them from technical failure liabilities of their AVs.
Furthermore, car insurers will lose out big segment of customer as they only provide
coverage for few car manufacturers instead of millions of car consumer. According to
Mc Kinsey (2015), car companies will also reshape their supply chains. This is
because with everything are automated, even the maintenance part they could strip
down labour cost and increase efficiency.
The third era, which the AVs become the primary means of transportation. The car
industry will start to focus to continue add additional function inside the car to
improve the cruising hour experience such as Internet, facial recognition and selfie
camera. On the other side, with the advancement of autonomous driving, this will
also indirectly accelerates the development for Robotomy. AVs are the first and the
basic step for robotic development, the convergence of automobile and robotic
development will bring us closer to a world of similar to japan famous robot anime,
Gundam, super cool robots such as Pacific Rim which is the convergence of gaming,
robot and automobile. Technology is undeniable an interesting field for us to explore,
the deeper we advance into it, the more changes we could anticipate from it.

Environmental impacts of autonomous cars

[ GO GREEN ]

Have you heard about Go Green?

Go Green refers the environmentally friendly habits that carry out to save our world
EARTH .
Why go green?

Earth is our one and only planet that humankind can live on. As the technology
advance nowadays, our only living planet Earths environment is being destroyed.
So, we have to start protecting our living planet. This is not only for our humankind,
but also the animals and plants. We are fighting not only for ourselves, but also for
our future generations.

So, how do autonomous cars will take us closer to our GREEN environment?

[ GREENHOUSE EFFECT ]
Earth sisters planet Venus is an example of the planet that ended up with the
runaway of greenhouse effect. Venus is called the hottest planet in the solar system.
But, do you know that Venus in the past may have the similar environment and
atmosphere with our Earth?

As the scientists discussed in an international Venus conference, Venus was used to

exist with plants, oceans, , and even life. But, the significant of climate changes in
Venus had boiled away the oceans and destroyed the environment on this planet.
This happened when the atmosphere was so thick with greenhouse gases that could
not release the trapped solar energy back to the space and sooner lead to the
uncontrollable heats.

Venus nowadays is permeated up to 96% of carbon dioxide!

* Well, we are not far from behind

[ AUTONOMOUS CAR ]

United States Environmental Protection Agency stated that transportation is the

second largest source of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide that exhausted from
burning gasoline is one of the major reasons that destroy the Green of the
environment. With the increasing of carbon dioxide in our environment, the
greenhouse effect is getting worse and worse.
A smooth traffic condition can reduce the wastage of energy. An autonomous cars
world is without traffic jam, therefore the energy can be utilised in more efficient way.
The International Road Transport Union (IRU) stated that the emission of carbon
dioxide is 300% more in traffic congestion. Thus, an autonomous car not only can
save our time but also helps to cut down the usage of non-renewable resources.

According to Scott Huntington (2015), the table shows the resources that will be
saved from our environment when there are autonomous cars in our world. The fuel
saving will be 102 million gallons when there are only 10% of autonomous cars in the
world.

If the autonomous cars increase to 20%, there will be a significant change in the
fuel resources saving. The fuel saving will increase from 102 million gallons to 724
million gallons! This means an increasing in 10% of autonomous cars will have
saved the fuel in 7 times or more!

Can you imagine that if there are more than 20% of autonomous cars in the world?
30%? 40%? 50%? or even 100%?

Before leaving this page, lets watch a video and think about a very simple question:

How did you get to work today?

Conclusion
 For the past hundred years ago, innovation within autonomous industry has
always been tried to create safer, cleaner and more affordable vehicles, yet the
progress seems to be a little slow down. However, we cannot stop technology and
progress, they are irrepressible, and so does the implementation of autonomous
cars. Everyone has to accept it because this is the power of convergence. There are
advantages and also disadvantages of autonomous cars that we can observed. For
businessman/ businesswoman, they might think that it is a good idea to have an
autonomous car because they could just sit back and do their work. In contrast, for
people who love to drive, this implementation is an affront to everything they hold
dear. Since autonomous car is still a new technology, so we all definitely need some
time to convey by this fully automated vehicle. Who is going to bear all the risks and
responsibilities for what went wrong? Some aspects of insurance will be impacted as
autonomous cars become the norm. The release of autonomous car will directly
have some impacts on us, whether its good or bad. However, the autonomous cars
are definitely on the way.