Ever since the first automobile was made back in 1885, people all over the world was fascinated by it. As an important symbol of the industrial age, the pistons-and-brute-force machine in an era that marks the exponential growth of our country. Cars conquered the daily culture of American life since the day it was introduced to this country.
A big part of why cars are deeply rooted in American material culture is that they are the epitome of convenience. That’s the allure and the promise that’s kept car buyers hooked, dating all the way back to the versatile, with the most popular and iconic consumer available Ford Model T. Convenience is not a selling point to be easily dismissed, this trusty conveyance. Always there, always ready, on no schedule but to its owner’s command. Buses can’t do that. Trains can’t do that. Even Uber makes riders wait.
But convenience, along with American history, culture, rituals, and man-machine affection, hide the verity value and nature of cars. And what is that nature? Merely this: In virtually every way imaginable, the car, as it is deployed and used these days, is killing us with the world that we live in.
How can an object that is literally a part of our daily life be harmful to us? Well, first and foremost, cars and other vehicles spew toxic wastes into the atmosphere that induces cancer, lung disease, asthma, and many other health issues. These emissions measurably decrease longevity not by a matter of days, but years. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s published study in 2013, more than “53,000 Americans die prematurely every year” from vehicle pollution, losing 10 years of life on average compared to their lifespans in the absence of vehicle emissions.
Apart from the toxic chemicals that are released into the atmosphere that we breathe in every day, the source of this issue, fuel for vehicles, are beings consumed in large quantities daily. Modern vehicles are profligate wasters of money and fuel: More than eighty cents of every dollar spent on gasoline is squandered by the inherent inefficiencies of the modern internal combustion engine. No part of daily life wastes more energy and, by extension, more money than the modern automobile.
There also are the indirect environmental, health, and economic prices of extracting, transporting, and refinement of oil for vehicle fuels, and also the large national-security prices and risks of being addicted to oil imports for vital amounts of that fuel. As an investment, the car is a massive waste of opportunity and money. Some people even categorize cars as the “the world’s most underutilized asset,” said by David Z. Morris in his article Want to know why Uber and automation really matter? that on average cars sit idly ninety-five percent of the time. Based on data collected from my parents’ and friends’ driving schedule, the typical car owner within the U.S. pays about $12,544 a year for a car that puts in a very mere 14-hour work per week when you accounting for all costs, from fuel to insurance to depreciation.
Then there is the matter of climate. Transportation could be a principal reason behind the worldwide climate crisis, exacerbated by a stubborn attachment to archaic, wasteful, and inefficient transportation modes and machines. But are cars the true culprit? Airplanes, for example, are typically singled out as the most carbon-intensive variety of travel in terms of emissions per passenger-mile, however, that is not the whole story: Total passenger miles by air are minuscule compared to cars. In any given year, sixty percent of American adults never traveled using aircraft, and the vast majority who do fly take only 1 round trip a year. Sadly, air travel is not the primary culprit, contributing only “eight percent of U.S. transportation-related greenhouse gases”(EPA). Cars and trucks, by contrast, pump out a “combined eighty-three percent of transportation carbon”, as shown on data published by the environmental protection agency.
And that’s not even counting cars’ most important cost: They waste lives. They are one main cause of America’s avertable injury and death, particularly among the young. Oddly, the most direct devastating consequence of the modern car, the carnage it leaves in its wake, seems to get the smallest amount of public outcry and spotlight. Jim McNamara, a sergeant with the California Highway Patrol, wherever officers spend eighty percent of their work time responding to automobile wrecks, believes such public inattention and apathy arise whenever a problem is “massive but diffuse.” Whether it’s climate change or car crashes, he says, if the problem doesn’t show itself all at once—as when an airliner goes down with dozens or hundreds of people on board—it’s hard to get anyone’s attention. Very few people see what he and his colleagues witness daily and up close: what hurtling tons of metal slamming into concrete and brick and trees and one another does to the human body strapped (or, all too often, not strapped) within.
Ever since the invention of modern vehicles, it has only brought us conveniences in the price of our lives. And now, decades later, with the new technological advances we are able to create a new type of automobile that can redefine the way people use their cars – Autonomous Cars.
In our current generation, more and more modern car makers are using battery-powered electric motors to replace the old and outdated traditional combustion engines in vehicles. The shift from fuel and pistons to batteries and electric motors will greatly reduce the intoxicating chemicals cars used to release while driving, which impacted us directly by us breathing them in. But now, electric motors use electricity directly from the onboard battery pack. With the invention of clean energy generation methods like solar panels that date back to 1883 by Charles Fritz, wind turbine, hydroelectricity from dams, and much more, we can now “refuel” our vehicles using clean energy generated through these methods and drive around without damaging our environment and ourselves, not to mention that electricity is a lot cheaper than gasoline prices in the United States.
Not to our surprise, autonomous cars live up to their name, that they can drive on their own! Modern technology company Nvidia has created a special type of graphical processing unit, to quickly and accurately identify other cars it sees on a camera, or in many cases, multiple cameras that are installed around the vehicles at an unimaginable speed through “AI and deep learning”. We’ve all heard the story of an accident caused by a drunk or sleep-deprived driver. But with an autonomous car, it does not require constant user inputs and is able to take emergency actions, hence no man-made mistakes that increase driving safety.
Back in 2016, not long from when the modern autonomous vehicle maker Tesla released their new generation of their Tesla Model S, there was a report where someone’s life was saved by the feature called “autopilot” within Tesla’s Model S cars. As reported by Zach Epstein on the Boys Genius Reports, the Tesla Model S owner, who has been identified only by his first name “Larry,” was “driving last week in Washington DC with his daughter in the car when his Model S’s collision prevention feature stopped his car from hitting a pedestrian”.
With all the benefits I have mentioned, the unparalleled road safety, the low expenses, and the environmental impact prove a significant benefit to mankind. Soon enough driver licenses will cease to exist, children, the elderly, and handicapped people will no longer struggle with land transportation. Could you imagine the world without constant air pollution and the fear of losing your loved ones due to some people who made the terrible mistake before they drove? I believe our culture will be forever changed.