Issues relating to Driverless Cars

This article discusses the IT risks associated with driverless cars, including the risk of accidents, vehicle hacking, and malfunctions. It provides examples of accidents involving autonomous vehicles and explains how hackers can compromise the safety of riders. The article also highlights the increasing electromagnetic field radiation due to the use of GPS tracking tools, radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and other technologies inherently present in autonomous vehicles.

Contemporary Issues in Information Technology
Driverless Car

Issues relating to Driverless Cars
Autonomous vehicles or driverless cars are referred to vehicles which are capable of sensing
the environment nearby and navigating without any human input. These vehicles use a
variety of technologies to sense their surrounding such as computer vision, LIDAR radar,
GPS, laser light, cameras, control electronics and others. Due to the advancement of
technologies and improves equipment, this technology has become highly accurate and
reliable. However, there are still various information technology issues associated with the
technology which adversely affect the interest of people and the whole society. Firstly, the
major risk associated with driverless cars is the risk of road accidents. These cars are not
manually controlled by humans that increase the risk of accident if any part of the car
malfunction or do not work properly (Lin, 2015). Many experts argue that driverless cars are
safer than human because they can evaluate the information and surrounding better than
human; however, the technology is not competent enough to replace human drivers
completely.
Furthermore, there are a number of examples in which issues associated with driverless cars
reveals. For example, in March 2018, a test-driverless car of Uber was involved in an
accident which crashed and killed a pedestrian (Berboucha, 2018). On June 30, Joshua
Brown was killed while driving his Tesla Model S which rammed into an 18-wheel truck in
Florida. On February 14, 2016, an autonomous test vehicle of Google Lexus collided with the
side of a bus. On March 23, 2018, a Tesla Model X SUV which was running in autopilot mode
clammed into a concrete highway lane divider and burst into flames. The diver, Wei Huang,
died in this accident (Christopher, 2017). These examples show that driverless car
technology can be dangerous for people and it did not protect drivers or other people from
accidents. Another key IT risk with driverless car technology is the threat of vehicle hacking
and malfunctions. Just like any computing device, self-driving cars can be hacked.
With the popularity of driverless cars, it becomes easier for skilled hackers to find out ways
to hack into the car and control its operations such as steering or acceleration (Boeglin,
2015). It can result in compromising the safety of riders in various ways. For example,
cybercriminals can hack the vehicles to gain access to personal information of the driver and
also control his/her car to cause an accident or held them captured in the car to ask for
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ransom. Cyber terrorists can use self-driving cars to cause harm to people by driving them
into highly populated areas. Furthermore, driverless cars share and communicate
information with other cars which means that hackers can collect the data from multiple
cars by hacking into one. Furthermore, the popularity of driverless cars results in increasing
electromagnetic field radiation due to use of GPS tracking tools, radio, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and
other technologies inherently present in autonomous vehicles (Lin, 2015). Thus, there are a
number of IT risks associated with driverless car technology which affects the whole society.
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References
Berboucha, M. (2018) Uber Self-Driving Car Crash: What Really Happened. [Online] Forbes.
Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/meriameberboucha/2018/05/28/uber-self-
driving-car-crash-what-really-happened/#365ca3614dc4 [Accessed on 29th July 2018].
Boeglin, J. (2015) The costs of self-driving cars: reconciling freedom and privacy with tort
liability in autonomous vehicle regulation. Yale JL & Tech., 17, p.171.
Christopher, N. (2017) Mishaps: A grief history of driverless car crashes. [Online] Economic
Times. Available at:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/small-biz/security-tech/technology/driverless-
crashes/articleshow/56510821.cms [Accessed on 29th July 2018].
Lin, P. (2015) Why ethics matters for autonomous cars. Autonomes fahren, pp. 69-85.
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