Autonomous Vehicles

About a year ago, I wrote about all the benefits of autonomous driving vehicles. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, PayPal, and of course Tesla Motors, said that his company is looking to build a autonomous car within three years; that's much sooner than promised by the other major car manufacturers. Musk even went as far as going to Twitter to look for engineers for the project (email him at autopilot@teslamotors.com). No one should underestimate Tesla Motors as it has produced one of the most highly rated vehicles (including in safety) on the road with the Model S.

I've been thinking about it some more and have encountered some issues for a fully automated experience. It would extremely difficult to cover every situation (as it is in most problems). There are limitations of how far vehicles can go with the power source technology we currently have so there must be some user responsibility to account for this (or software to help relieve this problem). Then there are little things like driving into drive ways, drive-thrus, and construction unbeknown to the mapping software. As much as I would love a completely autonomous driving experience, it probably won't be possible within three years but I think it would be feasible to have majority of driving to be automated.