How Close Are We to Driverless Cars and Will We Ever Lease Them?
If you’re even the slightest bit interested in anything with four wheels, you’ll have seen all the recent hype in the media surrounding Google’s self-driving car project.
This has sparked much debate in the Cars on Demand office, with the main question being – will we one day offer driverless cars for hire in the UK, and secondly, how far away is that day?
According to where you look, some people are saying it’ll be sooner than we think, with others agreeing that there’s still a long and (driverless?) winding road to go before we can expect to see Britain’s roads filled with robotically driven vehicles.
It would seem that it’s Google’s own development of a driverless car that has brought this debate to the masses. The car is impressive – a distinctive bubble shaped vehicle affectionately known as the Firefly because of its distinctive black and white panels – but although the company is the world’s most popular search engine, it doesn’t have any past experience of building cars.
We think that other incarnations of the driverless car project by manufacturers such as BMW, Mercedes and Audi could be a better place to look to gain a more realistic understanding of how far these big brands actually are down the driverless road.
Over in Stuttgart, Germany, Daimler (who own Mercedes Benz), have recently been testing what is likely to be the most autonomous road car on the market in the form of their Mercedes Benz S-Class. A whole host of technology allows the car to lock on to a vehicle in front and follow at a safe distance and take over acceleration, braking and steering.
It can also pick out objects on the road in front and will brake to prevent an accident occurring. All of this and it actually looks good, too.
We think we’d be much more inclined to consider leasing driverless cars if some elements of the on-road experience were still able to be controlled by the driver – after all, we do specialise in supercars as well so we’ve got driver satisfaction written through us like a stick of rock.
So, with the UK government due to publish a code of practice any day now allowing the testing of self-drive pods to go ahead in Milton Keynes and Coventry, and a full review of current legislation by 2017, maybe we should prepare ourselves (and our fleet!) for going driverless sooner rather than later.
What are your thoughts on driverless cars? Would you lease or buy one if they were ever to become a mainstream option? Let us know your thoughts.
