Listen: Transportation News Of The Week

In world where everything is headed in an automated direction, driverless cars seem to be the hot button issue right now. Even though the benefit of driverless cars seems to be great, safety concerns are top of mind. At the latest CES event in Las Vegas, Jim Hackett, CEO of Ford Motor Company stated, “Transport Systems in most major cities have reached capacity. It’s time to bring our streets into the sharing economy.” Of course, this speech generated a huge level of excited as this foresighted a complete redesign of the urban transportation system as we know it. However, with the rise of automated vehicles in the sight of all major automakers also comes the concern of driverless vehicle hacking. In fact, earlier this year, the University of Michigan deployed a small team of researchers in which they proved a dangerous scenario is easily a possibility for autonomous vehicles as one small decal placed on a stop sign could confuse it into perceiving it as a 45 mph sign. This has the led the US Department of Transportation to push autonomous vehicle makers to release cyber-security statements for the consumer, however, it is not mandatory. So with these safety concerns, it definitely has slowed down certain companies from utilizing this technology right off the bat, although, Google’s self-driving car unit has already been seen on the roads and even GM plans to have cars without a steering wheel or pedals by sometime in the next year. Rideshare companies like Uber are being cautious in saying that they simply won’t see out driverless car alternatives without the oversight of a human supervisor until these cars are proven save for the customer. With all this being said, it’s obvious that autonomous vehicles will be on the road before we know it, but the question still remains of when that will be the case as we as what is going to be done to maximize the security of each and every rider. To check out more Transportation Technology news, follow us on Twitter @TranspoTechMKT and make sure to visit our publication at marketscale.com to see what all we have to offer!