Cars can drive without your help; it is just a question of how well, much as you still worry about your teenage son or daughter getting behind the wheel even though your teen has passed the road test and earned a driver's license. The good news is that you do not have to worry about a fully self-driving car merging into your lane anytime soon. Fully autonomous passenger cars are not yet available for purchase as personal vehicles, and when they enter the market, Spokane is not likely to be among their first destinations. Autonomous vehicle technology, on the other hand, is ubiquitous; your car probably has some of it, and you are probably so used to driving with it that you cannot imagine living without it. The biggest obstacle to the adoption of fully autonomous vehicles is that they work better in some situations than others, and their weaknesses are especially noticeable in places like Spokane; this is also true of the autonomous features currently present in your car. A Spokane auto accident lawyer can help you if you have been injured in a car accident that autonomous vehicle features failed to prevent.

Areas Where Autonomous Vehicle Technology Still Has More to Learn

Fully autonomous vehicles are most in their element in the Sun Belt, where sunny conditions and grid pattern streets on flat terrain make it easy for bots to navigate safely to their destinations. Whether or not there is a human behind the wheel, the cars' brakes are best at knowing when to engage when every object that comes into their view is either an obstacle, which calls for an engagement of the brakes, or the wide-open road, which does not. Thus, driverless trucks are currently driving on test tracks in Texas in preparation for intrastate routes on Texas highways; they will transfer their freight to human-driven trucks as soon as they get off the highway.

The University of Central Florida seems like the obvious choice, then, for the most recent study on automatic brakes, which your car probably has.  According to the results of the study, driverless cars are even better than humans at knowing when to engage in brakes to avoid an obstacle straight ahead of them in broad daylight. In almost every other situation, though, the bots fall short. At dawn or dusk, driverless cars are only half as effective at avoiding obstacles. When turning, humans do five times as well at knowing when to brake. All of this means that automatic brakes, at least in their current form, cannot always save distracted drivers from themselves. Someone might still hit you if neither the driver nor the sensors notice you in time.

Contact West Law Office About Car Accident Cases

A personal injury lawyer can help you if you got injured in a car accident where the driver did not brake in time and the automatic brakes were unable to correct the mistake. Contact West Law Office in Spokane, Washington, to find out more about your legal options.