Can self-driving cars make roads safer and less congested?
Pedestrians in downtown Miami one weekday last November might have noticed something unusual about the blue Ford Fusions threading their way through the city’s congested streets. An odd-looking array of cameras and sensors sat atop each car’s roof. And inside, the person in the driver’s seat almost never touched the steering wheel.
Unlike the conventional cars around them, the Fusions were under the control of software and hardware developed by Argo AI, a self-driving technology company funded by Ford Motor Co. The human behind the wheel was there only to take over if the software encountered a circumstance it could not handle.
That happened infrequently, according to journalists who took test rides in the self-driving Fusions. The autonomous vehicles, or AVs, had trouble navigating through dust clouds and certain other traffic conditions, and they behaved more cautiously than a human driver would, the journalists said. But they maneuvered effectively around bicyclists, mopeds, pedestrians and construction sites — even an Audi moving in reverse down the middle of the road.
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Image credit: CQ Researcher/Getty Images/Bloomberg/Michaela Handrek-Rehle