Can Autonomous Vehicles become a reality in India?

The iot rush has ushered in great breakthroughs in tech space. One of them is automation. Automation of not just business processes, but also locomotives. But, considering the traffic laden lanes and heavy congestion on roads, can Autonomous Driving Cars become a reality, especially in India?

Before we answer the above question, let’s look at the possible scenarios.

Tesla has been attempting to sell this dream of driverless cars for many years now, with some luck in getting its customers to buy “Autopilot and full self-driving capability cars”.

Humans, as a thumb rule are not great drivers, and 1.35 million people are killed around the world each year on roads. With such a staggering number staring right in front of us, how are we going to overcome this problem with tech enabled automation?

While this is a bigger problem to solve, the recent car crashes by autonomous cars that involved a few fatalities is only exacerbating the current situation.

ADAS, Advance Driver Assistance System is an add on that’ll look at improving the customer experience in the coming years.

ADAS has the following features:

01.??Safe distance follow-through.

02.??Automatic Emergency Braking

03.??Detecting the mood of the driver (based on advanced AI capabilities)

While the first two points mentioned above is in vogue, the last feature – which detects the mood of the driver is up for research.

InfoGraphic : Credits : https://www.mymemory.co.uk/blog/the-future-of-self-driving-cars-is-now/

Data is the Secret Sauce:

As more autonomous vehicles get pumped into the market, more chances of data getting collected. With increase in such scenarios, many probabilities will arise, thereby resulting in a Win. But who will own the data? Will it be the autonomous system provider, the car owner or the driver? This is debatable as data will be much needed to analyze vehicle performance.

What challenge can Indian Roads pose to Autonomous Vehicles?

01.??The first challenge is Indian Roads are chaotic. Lanes are pretty unstructured, and an algorithm that predicts the complexities will be needed to beat the challenging road conditions.

02.??Lack of lane discipline amongst people driving on the roads.

03.??A simple templatized model cannot attempt to overcome the Indian road traffic conditions.

While the strides in Data, AI and Machine Learning attempts to unlock the secrets and solve seemingly impossible problems, an Autonomous Car becoming a reality on Indian Roads still remains an imagination in the minds of many.

Unless the core issue of saving lives is addressed and not defeated in the process of designing such vehicles, we will still be caught up in attempting to using technology to break barriers.

Future holds promise, but it comes with a huge price. What are your thoughts?

“Self-driving cars will double the capacity of highways because the variability of human drivers will be taken out of the equation.”?Dave Waters