I would like to take issue with a recent New York Times opinion piece, “Self-driving cars, fueled by hype.”
The author makes no note of the familiar alternative, human-driven cars. Those fallible creatures kill just under 33,000 people a year and injure over 300,000. Autonomous cars could have a fatal accident every two weeks and still drive over a thousand times more safely than humans.
I have to note that computers do not drink and drive, have road rage, drive while distracted, deliberately break the law, drive with stupidity and drive when they are too old to get behind the wheel.
I am 73. There will come a time when I need to stop driving. I’d like to have an autonomous car (electric, of course) that would get me around my little town at 25 mph.
We have to try new things in order to advance. Airplanes and computers had to be developed.
As the folks in Alaska say, “If you’re not the lead dog, the scenery always stays the same.”
John Howard
South Hadley