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The Christmas Holidays Will Be Even More Wonderful Due To The Advent Of Self-Driving Cars

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It’s that wonderful time of the year!

The Christmas season is upon us and there is joy in the air.

Stores are festooned with ornaments and sparkling lights. Music is heard throughout the malls and you can’t help but start to feel the spirit of giving and sharing. It is time to be joyous, spending time with family and friends, and relishing precious time of togetherness and good tidings.

Well, maybe it’s not entirely so rosy and imbued with quaint mistletoe.

Frustrations admittedly abound.

Driving over to the store to get gifts can be an exasperating and beguiling chore.

You need to contend with horn-honking traffic jams.

Other drivers are frantic to get to their shopping destinations and oftentimes cut you off. Parking is a near impossibility. Fender benders are rampant as drivers squeeze into parking spots and emergency lanes that they shouldn’t be using. Reported cases of drivers getting out of their cars to punch each other over driving disputes catch headlines and holiday-based road rage gets into gear.

Turns out that it is a dog-eat-dog world when it comes to getting your seasonal shopping undertaken.

Much of the time, you find yourself shaking your head in sadness and disgust that the holiday spirit seems to not enter people’s minds when they are driving their cars, and instead they appear to be overcome by a selfish get-out-of-my-way take-no-prisoners attitude.

Even a quick trip to the local grocery store to stock up on holiday cookies or eggnog is rife with traffic and parking woes. A driving task that should take a few minutes gets extended into hours of time, along with perhaps having someone wave their fist at you as they extol that you’ve not been driving fast enough or be willing to speed through those yellow lights and roll through stop signs.

Of course, there’s also the driving involved in getting to the house of your relatives for an extended family get together. More agony of being in snarled holiday traffic.

You might also be driving to holiday parties put on by work colleagues or attending holiday parties by associations that you are a member of.

Plus, many people opt to take vacation during this time of the year, dovetailing into company holiday granted time-off, and proceed to drive on long trips across their state or across the U.S.

According to national statistics, approximately 100 million Americans will travel 50 miles or more from home during the Christmas holiday period and nearly 90% of that travel is done on the roadways (versus flying or say taking a train).

Hopefully, all that maddening time spent on the busy roadways won’t undermine your overall festive outlook, though it certainly can put a damper on your holiday excitement.

In short, there is way too much frustration and angst involved in roadway traveling during the holidays and it’s a darned shame that there’s seemingly nothing that can be done to avert the anguish.

Wait a minute, maybe Santa has something for us that can help.

Here’s a question to ponder: Will the advent of true self-driving cars provide some relief from the holiday angst and aid in making the season as wonderful as it should be?

I say yes.

Let’s unpack the matter (and make sure to put a bow on it too).

The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

It is important to clarify what I mean when referring to true self-driving cars.

True self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5, while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some point out).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so I’m not going to include them in this discussion about the holidays.

For semi-autonomous cars, it is equally important that I mention a disturbing aspect that’s been arising, namely that in spite of those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And The Holidays

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

When you go to a mall, you won’t be driving, and instead, the AI will do the driving for you.

Guess what?

This means that you no longer need to be the one that bears the frustration and angst of being at the wheel.

There you are, riding along in a true self-driving car, and letting your mind wander to dreams of sugarplums dancing and not needing to be aware that some idiot driver ahead of you is cutting off your car or going as slow as a snail.

Let the AI worry about it.

Furthermore, you can be watching videos or live streaming video while going over to the store, doing so by the likely addition of LED displays mounted inside the driverless car. The odds are that self-driving cars will have high-def displays and be connected to the Internet at top speeds such as 5G.

You can do a live connection with a loved one and via a Facetime-like interaction be able to discuss what gifts to get for friends and family.

Maybe have some eggnog during the drive, perhaps spiked (which you would never do as a driver), though please don’t let things get out of hand (it would be unseemly to pour out of a driverless car and be as drunk as a skunk).

In terms of gift getting, we’ve already begun to see a large shift from going to brick-and-mortar stores to instead ordering online and having your packages delivered to your home. With true self-driving cars, most pundits predict that we’ll increase dramatically the amount of home-delivered items since driverless cars will be able to drive those purchased packages to your house.

Family vacations will be easier to undertake too (see my detailed explanation here).

You and the family can enjoy the time together during a cross country road trip. Rather than the adults having to constantly trade-off doing the driving task, the AI will be doing the driving. This allows the adults to have fun with the kids while inside the driverless car, playing games and otherwise devoting attention that would have been going toward the driving chore.

Speaking of kids, another facet of driverless cars will be that children can get around to places without requiring an adult driver to be present and being there to drive the car.

Suppose you want the kids to get over to grandma’s house and you aren’t yet home to drive them. By using a self-driving car, the kids can pile into the vehicle and be driven by the AI, allowing you to get over to grandma’s once your Scrooge boss lets you out of the office.

As an aside, there is some controversy about letting kids ride in driverless cars without having any adult supervision, and it is hard to imagine such a future, but there is a bona fide case to be made that we culturally might eventually change our views on this matter and find this to be a valid form of transport for non-adults (see more here).

Think about the other possibilities of how driverless cars can alleviate the stress and strain of the holidays.

A self-driving car can drop you at your destination and thus there’s no need for you to deal with parking the car.

Toss out those crazy parking lot fisticuffs moments since you won’t ever need to be in a parking lot, to begin with, and toss out the annoying act of driving round and round to find a parking spot.

Some pundits are saying that we’ll no longer have traffic congestion once we have self-driving cars, but that’s a rather Utopian viewpoint. For many years to come, likely for decades, we are going to have a mixture of both conventional cars and self-driving cars on our roadways (there are about 250 million conventional cars today in the United States).

All in all, we are going to continue to have traffic congestion for a long time to come.

Yet, despite the traffic congestion, when you are inside a driverless car you might not especially notice that the traffic is backed-up (our sense of time might be altered via self-driving cars, see this explanation here). If you are watching a classic movie while inside a driverless car, such as It’s A Wonderful Life, you probably won’t care that a morass of cars is all backed-up and crawling along.

Another nifty aspect will be that people today that are mobility marginalized or disadvantaged will likely have greater mobility access due to the emergence of self-driving cars.

Maybe your elderly father is not able to drive a car and lives far away from the rest of the family. It might be logistically difficult for you to go pick him and up and drive him to a family holiday get together.

On the other hand, he could use a driverless car and show-up ready to enjoy some cherished time with you all.

That’s truly a wonderful life moment.

More Reasons For Holiday Cheer

I’m not saying that driverless cars will erase or eradicate all the stress of the holidays.

No doubt, there will still be lots of holiday stress to be had.

At least you can have some contemplative meditation time while inside a driverless car.

Or, better still, use the time inside the self-driving car to catch some winks.

It is expected that most driverless cars will have reclining seats so that you can take a nap or go to sleep while on a driving journey. After a day’s hard work, you can grab a nap on the way home, and feel refreshed when you walk in the door, greeting the rest of the family rather than snarling at them.

Something else is worth considering too about self-driving cars.

There are many that are hoping and expecting that driverless cars will save lives, meaning that the number of lives lost by car crashes and car injuries will be substantially reduced.

Currently, there are about 40,000 annual car-related deaths and approximately 2.7 million car-related injuries in the United States.

Take a somber moment to reflect on the fact that 40,000 people each year in the U.S. won’t be celebrating the holidays with their loved ones due to being killed in a car crash.

And if that number doesn’t seem disheartening enough, consider that over a decade or so of such loses amounts to 400,000 or more people killed in car crashes in America, or nearly a half million people consisting of beloved fathers, mothers, and children that won’t be able to see the holidays.

Via self-driving cars, presumably those deaths and injuries will be a lot less, since the AI won’t be prone to drinking and driving, and won’t be distracted using a smartphone, etc.

As you can see, driverless cars bode well for making the holidays a time for family and friends to come together and ease the burden of driving, along with making it feasible for people to avert many of the unfortunate adverse consequences of car driving.

Conclusion

In case you are reading this to your children as a bedtime story akin to ‘Twas night before Christmas and they are perhaps worried that maybe Santa is going to ditch his reindeer and use instead a driverless sleigh, I assure you that Santa has fully committed to keeping those reindeer.

Yes, St. Nick is going to keep on exclaiming to Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen that they need to dash away, dash away all.

For the kids that are particularly smarmy, they might crack a wee smile and whisper that the reindeer are all robots and AI-based, but don’t let them get away with this, and tell them that the reindeer are real and the prancing and pawing of each little hoof are genuine.

And that’s the merry and rosy truth on the matter!

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