With the developments of technologies of artificial intelligence and sensor, there is no doubt that driverless vehicles will replace current vehicles which can not move without driver in the near future. For sake of understanding whether the trend is positive or negative, it’s necessary for people to contemplate the advantages and disadvantages of self-driving cars. The pros and cons of self-driving cars are mainly as follow.

First of all, ideally, self-driving cars minimize the chance of a person making an error that results in an accident. These vehicles are supposed to stay safely in their lane, follow traffic rules strictly and protect the people inside the vehicle as well as others on the road.

But reality doesn’t always match this perfect picture. Research shows self-driving features give people a false sense of safety that leads to more unsafe driving behaviour. For example, I had heard a piece of news that a woman died in a tunnel, because of her illegal use of cruise control. Under normal situation, cruise control can safely reduce the manual operations, but this lady started cruise control at a speed of 120 kilometres per hour in a tunnel with a speed limit of 80 kilometres per hour, which finally led to this tragedy.

Beyond this, due to high dependence of unmanned vehicles on technology, it greatly raise the odds of accidents caused by technical problems. Look at the famous example of the San Francisco pedestrian killed in a self-driving Uber crash. Investigators determined the vehicle’s technology sensed that pedestrian was there but fail to apply the brakes. The human driver was too distracted to react before crash.

Secondly, one of the greatest benefits of unmanned vehicles is the possibility of reducing congestion in road. If self-driving cars are widespread, there could be fewer accidents, fewer traffic jams, and reduced demand for highway police and EMTs. Public transportation could become much easier too.

Potentially, this could lead to additional benefits like lower insurance costs, less gasoline usage, and a minimal chance of injuries and damages from car accidents. According to the research, it would save hundreds of billions dollars annually.

But there is no such thing as a free lunch. Nobody knows that how the roads will be different if they are dominated by driverless cars. Generally, people tend to view machines as reliable and predictable. However, studies have found that both human drivers and self-driving cars can perform unpredictable behaviour. For example, driverless cars sometimes get confused by things like construction, gravel roads, pedestrians and animals in the roadway.

Finally, there is a evident drawback of driverless cars. Because there is no driver inside self-driving cars, so if accidents happen on it, it will bring numerous ethical dilemma such as famous The Trolley Problem.

To sum up, based on the pros and cons I mentioned above, I reckon that the advantages of driverless cars can’t outweigh its disadvantages.