This week’s SmartCar roundup features a new entrant in the autonomous car race, a kit that helps you get going, and reason why autonomous cars will decongest traffic but lawmakers may hinder the progress.

Tesla joins autonomous car race

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk announced that the company is working to produce cars with auto-pilot in the next three years.  According to Musk, Tesla’s computer system would be able to control 90 percent of functions, allowing the driver to sit back and relax.

Tesla currently has a job posting for an Advanced Driver Assistance Systems Controls Engineer who will be responsible for helping the company push its efforts to produce a fully automated vehicle.

Tesla joins a growing market, as Google and Nissan has been very vocal about their autonomous car efforts. Nissan recently announced that it will be launching a fully automated car by 2020, and Google’s been openly experimenting with self-driving cars for well over a year.  If Tesla is able to keep with its timetable, then by 2016, we’ll be seeing the first fully autonomous car out in the market.

The road to driverless cars

The push to produce self-driving cars continues to grow, specially when these types of vehicle could solve traffic congestion.

In the video “The counterintuitive science of traffic,” Tom Vanderbilt discussed how autonomous cars can decongest traffic, as they can maintain a steady speed on the road as well as keep a safe distance from cars, people, and cyclists, lessening the risks for accidents.  Autonomous cars will be better at merging, thus lessening road rage and traffic slow down.  And with sensors, factors like fog and inclement weather won’t have to slow drivers down as much, since the drivers don’t need to see where they are going.  The sensors would let the car know if there’s something blocking the road, and the car will react to the information accordingly.

Though a world wherein human driving errors are eliminated is an an enticing concept, there’s still the matter of the law. Will it be legal to drive an autonomous car, and will they be regulated with new laws?  In the US, most states will allow autonomous cars on the road provided that a human is always ready to take control at any given time.  But that certainly diminishes the appeal of a fully automated car.

Driverless vehicles could boost productivity, as drivers would have more time to do other things while getting from point A to B, but if the law requires you to be ready to take over at any given time, it means the driver should always be focused on the road, which means the driver can’t actually do anything else while the car drives itself.  All of the efforts put by car manufacturers into driverless cars will be for not if consumers don’t see the need to purchase a vehicle that doesn’t really deliver anything for them.  If only we could all afford chauffeurs…

Parrot

If you’re still looking for a better way to use your phone while driving, then Parrot’s plug ‘n’ play offerings may be what you’re looking for.

Parrot offers different plug ‘n’ play devices like the Parrot Minikit+ which allows you to sync two bluetooth phones to it.  It syncs the contacts for both devices and even assigns different ringtones for the device, so you’ll know which phone the call is coming from.  You can use voice recognition to answer or reject a call, find contacts, listen to music, and get directions.  It can store up to 20,000 contacts and it automatically switches on when you enter the vehicle.