Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, thinks that car lovers should welcome driverless cars and not fight against it.
Brin is a known advocate of driverless cars. Aside from owning a Tesla Model S, he is also one of the first six people in the world to own the Tesla Model X, the recently unveiled electric SUV of Tesla Motors.
Google is also developing its own self-driving car, and at a panel that the company recently held regarding the technology, Brin offered a great response on why car lovers should welcome the development of self-driving vehicles.
"How dare you mess with the relationship between the car lover and their car?" asked an Australian journalist at the panel. "Is the goal here a future without human drivers?" he added.
Brin's answer at the scalding question showed how invested he and the company is in the technology.
"I can definitely empathize with that view and in America, too, people definitely have an intimate relationship with their cars," said Brin. "I love the idea of being out on an open road that's curvy and fun, when you're driving and really getting into it. But that's probably about 1 percent of my experience."
Brin's answer encapsulates the need for self-driving cars and why car lovers should definitely not be fighting against the technology. Car lovers make enjoyable moments while leisurely cruising through wide and scenic highways. However, most of the time, what cars and drivers go through are stuck in stop-and-go traffic situations, waiting for red lights to go green, or circling around corners to look for a parking spot.
A much worse situation is that drivers could find themselves in accidents. According to Google, the improvement of safety for drivers and passengers is one of the top priorities for their development of driverless car technology.
There are about 1.2 million fatalities caused by car crashes per year, with more than 33,000 of these cases reported from the United States. According to John Krafcik, the new CEO of Google's self-driving vehicle program, the number on fatalities is equivalent to about five Boeing 737 airplanes crashing weekly.
Brin concedes that it is important for car lovers to still experience what made them love cars in the first place, but there is no point in hindering the development of self-driving car technology.
According to Brin, open-road driving will always bring joy to car lovers. However, for a big part of the regular daily driving, Brin thinks that drivers would want cars to drive themselves, and perfected technology on self-driving cars would be much safer not just for the driver and the passengers but also for all the people surrounding the driverless vehicle.
