Bicycling is a cheap and emissions-free way to get around. It was recently annoucned that driverless cars will be on the roads in the near future, which is actually great news for cyclists. What’s more, an Oxford University research team is developing retrofittable driverless car tech said to be much cheaper and simpler than Google’s Lidar-based system. Nissan chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, gushed at this year’s Frankfurt motor show: “In 2020 all the problems that we have in allowing autonomous driving will be solved.”When all cars are self-driving, equipped with light detecting and ranging (Lidar) and 360-degree cameras, there will be no more accidental bike collisions. And the self-driving car will also know when it’s unsafe for the “driver” to exit: so dooring of cyclists will be history.
What do you think of this invention? Would you purchase one?
Written by Leslie Wolf, Class of 2015