Co-founder Elon musk believes driverless cars are the future

Tesla CEO: ”You can’t have a person driving a two ton death machine”

The co-founder and CEO of Tesla – a manufacturer of electric cars – has outlined his views on a driverless car future, stating: "It’s too dangerous, you can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine."

Speaking at the company’s annual developer’s conference, Elon Musk compared his vision of the car of the future to other tech progression.

"It would be like an elevator," said Musk. "They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you’re at … the car is going to be just like that."

Noting that car production sits at around 100 million per year, with 2 billion currently on the roads globally, Musk said the change to driverless cars will "take 20 years" to accomplish, if the industry decided to go in that direction.

In December last year Volvo and POC revealed a cyclist proximity sensor that would communicate danger to the driver. This system does however require both a cycle helmet fitted with a chip and the same in the car. 

In 2013, Volvo also introduced its Cyclist Detection System with fully automatic emergency braking in city traffic.

Last month BikeBiz executive editor Carlton Reid spoke to the BBC’s Look North on the subject of driverless cars, which you can view below. 

Reid has also blogged on the subject in The Guardian.

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