As a South Miami lawyer who handles fatal car crashes, the year’s end is time for me to reflect on the number of traffic fatalities in Florida and the United States. In 2010 the U.S. Department of Transportation reported that there were nearly 33,000 deaths. Most states have recently passed laws prohibiting the use of handheld cellphones while driving.
Nevada has taken a unique approach by making it legal to text as long as the driver is in a self-driving car. Clearly, Nevada is at the cutting edge with this legislation. I have been a lawyer suing drunk drivers in Florida for over twenty years and I think we should adopt the same law.
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Google and its team of geniuses are working at bringing their vast resources to create technology that will provide cars with the minute details of roads and traffic that will anticipate stop lights, road blocks and intersections before the human eye or brain is able to react. Google’s new technology utilizes specialized laser beams, radar and cameras. Google proposes to make the ultimate accident avoidance a computer rather than the distracted human brain.
According to a recent New York Times article, the Google self-driven cars have already traveled over 200,000 miles, criss-crossing Nevada and California’s highways and cities. In fact, a Google car has driven the world’s most “crooked street,” San Francisco’s famous Lombard Street, without an incident.
Google’s lead engineer, Sebastian Thurn, foresees a world where cars will be summoned on demand, rather than choking our cities parking lots and garages. He also believes that the current European experiment of “platooning” should also be employed in the United States. Platooning is when cars utilize the technology long employed by the professional cycling peloton, the practice of drafting to save energy and fuel. Cars will follow behind each other in such a fashion that they almost touch, and, with Google’s technology, they can be linked so that when one car brakes or accelerates, so will the following cars.
Our Pembroke Pines car crash law firm believes that self-driving cars will not only transform transportation and will help eliminate the types of catastrophic car and truck accidents kill people in Florida every year.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) early projections, the number of traffic fatalities fell from 33,808 to 32,788 from 2009 to 2010. This may represent the fact that fewer people are on the road due to gas prices and unemployment.
