You hail a cab, and step out to the curb. Climbing over the cloth interior, and buckling your seatbelt, you notice something unusual about this particular cab: There is no driver, or no human driver that is. A recent study has shown that autonomous taxi cabs could replace our personal vehicles by 2030 reducing greenhouse emissions by as high as 90% as well as many other benefits to come with the end of manually driven cars. So begins with the rise of the autonomous taxi.
Reducing greenhouse emissions by giving up the driver’s seat
Autonomous taxis could slow global warming and climate change, by reducing the CO2 emissions on the planet. According to Berkley study published today by Berkeley scientists Jeffery Greenblatt and Samveg Saxena, “… if five percent of 2030 vehicle sales (about 800,000 vehicles) were shifted to autonomous taxis, it would save about 7 million barrels of oil per year and reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by between 2.1 and 2.4 million metric tons of CO2 per year, equal to the emissions savings from more than 1,000 two-megawatt wind turbines.”
Giving up the role of driving to let robots drive us around
It seems far-fetched to imagine a world where humans no longer operate their own vehicles, but instead have autonomous taxis that take them everywhere they need to go.However, These ideas are not ludicrous in any way for companies like Google. In fact they have been testing self-driving cars on roads with non-autonomous vehicles for years, with an amazingly low number of incidents reported.
According to Google’s reports, “In the six years of our project, we’ve been involved in 14 minor accidents during more than 1.8 million miles of autonomous and manual driving combined. Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.” Since the Google autonomous vehicle program began, never once have one of the 14 incidents been the direct result of the google self-driving car.
This is not due to a shortage of Google’s autonomous vehicles on the road either. Currently in Mountain view, California, there are a total of 48 cars operating on the public roads at any given time.
Autonomous Taxis are the clean transportation solution to brighter future for planet earth. At the rate that autonomous vehicles are being tested, and the tremendous benefits of switching to this mode of transportation, it may not be long before you’re hitching a ride with an autonomous taxi.
