In the last couple of decades, technology has been evolving at an incredible speed, bringing a big number of new benefits and tools along the way. Us, humans, have learned how to use them in our favour, creating innovative projects and devices to make our lives somewhat easier, bringing big opportunities for humanity. This new wave started with the Sixth Generation, from 1995 to now; in which a lot of elements that we use daily were created, such as mobile phones, artificial intelligence, and robots. This leads us to one specific topic: self-driving vehicles. Autonomous automobiles are, most likely, one of the biggest and most ambitious projects created in the past decade, not only because of the hard work that takes to develop them, but also because it’s putting people’s life at risk if it isn’t built in the right way. This is constantly confronting different laws as well as taking care of what is considered ethically and morally correct.
The idea of an autonomous vehicle was first presented in 1925 by an electric engineer called Francis Houdina, who built a car which could be controlled by radio. It was tested in Manhattan and drove along 19 kilometers between the Fifth Avenue and Broadway. It became popular by 1939 at the New York World’s Fair by Norman Bel Geddes representing General Motors, a multinational that manufactures, assemblies, and distributes facilities throughout North America, Canada, and other countries around the world. It produces components, engines, as well as financial services. The aim of the multinational was to display an image of how the world would be in 20 years. In 1958, General Motors made this idea a real concept. The car was supplied with pick- up coils, a component that answers to a change in magnetic flux by generating voltage, at the front end of the vehicle that detected the current flowing through a wire 10 place in the road. The flow could be changed in order to tell the vehicle to move the steering wheel left or right.
As we have seen throughout history technology grows in an exponential way, self-driving cars will follow the same path and within no time we will all have one of these smart cars at our garage. This is industry will be expanded in such way that prices will drop making it more accessible for everyone, although this time is yet to come, we can already see some manufacturers who announced new products at a more reasonable price, such as Nissan. There are also many different projects and strategies planned for the future using this new wave, companies such as Uber, Google, and many more will be using autonomous vehicles and self-driving cars for future improvements. This will 16 consequently bring a lot of changes in the work industry regarding vehicles as the main matter, taxi drivers being the most affected ones.