Your car backs itself out of the garage and onto your driveway and the door swings open for you to step in. As you close the door, you tell the car where you want to go, it downloads the route to your destination. Without having to touch a button, the car pulls into the street, and you set off.

Though it sounds like something out of a movie, this reality is approaching. Autonomous cars are going to be on the road whether we’re ready for them or not.

In fact, they’re so close, cars that employ some autonomous features already exist. Manufacturers such as Mercedes Benz, Toyota and Tesla are providing us the first stepping stones to autonomous motoring.

Today, the Autopilot mode in the Tesla Model S is without a doubt the most advanced semi-autonomous vehicle available. With a couple quick pulls on the cruise control stalk, you’re completely hands- and feet-free. The car employs adaptive cruise control, so once you set your desired speed and following distance, the car will slow down and speed up with traffic in an effort to maintain your set parameters. No feet are necessary, as the car will brake itself all the way down to a stop if need be.

The Model S also has Auto Lane Change, which only requires drivers to engage the turn signal stalk, and the car will change lanes all on its own.

The feature of Tesla’ Autopilot that really amazes me is Autosteer. As long as there are markers on the road, the car will stay in its lane. It will navigate you through curves in the road, freeway exit and entrance ramps, and almost anything a car would come across. Monitoring the radius of corners and slowing down appropriately, Teslas can turn corners without anyone touching the steering wheel or the pedals.

The ability to drive mile after mile without giving any inputs to the car is accomplished by sensors and cameras discreetly positioned all around the car’s exterior. But all this advancement becomes child’s play when compared to Google’s autonomous car. Not available to the public for legal and economic reasons (the system alone costs $40,000), Google’s fully autonomous vehicle fleet has racked up over one million miles of self-driving.

Google uses a technology called LIDAR, which senses everything around it and transmits the data to the car’s computer, making the car capable of handling any kind of driving done on a regular basis. Tesla’s Autopilot feature is really only usable on the freeway, while Google’s car can navigate its way through a metropolitan area without issue.

While all this technology is revolutionary and mind-boggling, there are some serious ethical questions that people in the industry have to deal with. What happens if a car is forced to choose between running over a pedestrian who just ran out into the street, or a head on collision with oncoming traffic? That kind of a decision has to be programmed into the computer’s code. Even though autonomous cars can end up saving millions of lives all on their own, we still have to make those kinds of tough decisions if the technology is going to be a reality.

For me, the ethical side is emotional as well. Driving is my release, and this kind of technology figuratively and literally takes the wheel out of my hands. Do I think this is some horrible thing that we should avoid? Absolutely not. There are millions of people out there who would love nothing more than to kick their feet up and take a nap on the way to work, not to mention the staggering amount of deaths we could avoid.

But if someone were to ask me if I wanted an autonomous car in my garage, I’d say there isn’t a chance in the world. Getting behind the wheel of my car and being fully in control of what I’m doing isn’t something I would ever give up.

Published on February 7, 2016 at 10:29 pm