The self-driving car is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It's now a reality, and it's heading toward us fast.
It's no secret that Google is leading the way toward this new era. They have been using automatic autos for awhile now, actively testing their fleet of prototype self-driving vehicles in select areas of the country. Earlier this year Nevada made autonomous vehicles legal by issuing the first license for a car that drives itself. California followed the lead last month when they instituted their own autonomous vehicles law. Google hopes driverless vehicles will be cruising roadways across America within five years.
According to Google, driverless vehicles offer a lot of advantages to society as a whole. They provide a means of transportation to those who do not have a driver license or are unable to drive themselves, such as the young, elderly, handicapped or the intoxicated. Google also claims they are safer, citing an accident-free record for their vehicles after driving over 300,000 miles on their own. Google says these auto-driving autos don't run red lights.
Apparently, neither do they speed.
When a car is designed to automatically obey the traffic laws and set its speed accordingly, is there a need to use a radar detector, or even have one at all? Will the radar detector as we know it become obsolete?
Now, before you put your detector up on a shelf, consider this. Unless you work on that specific project for Google, you probably don't have a self-driving vehicle, at least not yet. That is still half a decade away, and probably a lot longer for most of the general population. In the meantime, we all need to get somewhere today. As of now and in the foreseeable future, if you speed you can still get a ticket and you can't blame it on the car.
When automatic autos do become the standard, as they inevitably are destined to be, they may still require human intervention on occasion, should something go horribly wrong. In that case, it may be wise to keep a radar detector around as a backup, especially if the human driver is not accustomed to manually operating a vehicle that never goes over the speed limit in auto mode.
Could the radar detector become obsolete? It could. Perhaps, someday, it will. But there are still many miles to go until that day arrives, with a lot of speed traps along the way. Until the day of the automatic auto, keep your detector turned on, tuned in and watch your speed.
