Claire Keenan
As humans, we have no control over our future, but should this be the be the same for how we get from place to place. Driverless cars are the new technology, that supposedly will enhance the safety of drivers and their passengers, by eliminating the fault of human reactions. However, with the excessive amount of technology that will need to be built into the new vehicles, is there enough room left, for a touch of luxuriousness?
Mark Eckert, a 25-year-old salesman living in Randwick, believes that the real problem with driverless cars in the future, won’t be the safety aspects, but the aesthetics of the car itself and how it will sell on the market.
“I mean the big problem with them, is that you look at google cars and you see they have these really ugly sensors on the top,” he says. “What they’re going to mean is that we are just going to have a lot of uglier cars on the road”.
19-year-old Emily Har, a full-time student from Cabramatta West says: “I wish they were a bit cheaper”.
Linley Briggs, a 27-year-old Physiotherapist from Randwick argues there are more important things to be worrying about than the look of the cars.
“My thoughts are that they’re a really positive step because so many accidents are human fault,” she says. “But for them to work everyone would need to be driving driverless for it to eliminate human error. So, it’s going to take quite a long time to fully transition”.
Glue Store worker, Andriana Xilaportas from Weatherwill Park at 21 years-old, believes that: “It means less concentration on roads and more laziness”.
While the discussion continues of whether driverless cars will be beneficial for our future safety on the roads, we are still a while away from placing our lives in the hands of technology.
“I think they are still five to 10 years away from being reasonably commercially viable,” Mark Eckert says. But I think once they are, you’ll actually see a smooth transition because we’ve seen as of now, that the technology works decently well with human-drived cars”.
*all interviewees did not wish to be photographed*
