Mass Insurance: These Smart Tech Solutions Are The Highway To Self-Driving Vehicles

Wearable technology offers a fine set of interim tools on the way to fully operating, and ubiquitous, self-driving vehicles. There are several products currently on the market that are at more of an early-adoption stage, but have yet to reach the high levels of consumer demand that are projected over the coming years. The extent to which wearable technology will be perceived as a valuable connection device to one's vehicle is yet to be seen. As Tony Rizzo in Wearable Tech News maintains, "We're not convinced the buying public [will] go out of its way to seek out these features. Rather auto makers will implement them as solutions...and wait for consumers to adopt them."

One issue that comes up frequently in conversations about wearable technology and driving is safety, the logic being that if it is dangerous to use a smart phone while operating a vehicle, then it is by that fact as dangerous to use wearable technology. However, such claims have to be proven, and not merely presupposed, especially when it comes to important matters like driving laws. As well, wearable tech's multi-app functionality can become a deterrent for legislators, meaning that it's not the use of the technology in communication with the vehicle that's the issue, but the fact that one can simultaneously chat, check email, and surf the web that poses safety issues. The pattern with Canadian regulation on technology is that it varies from province to province, but, as Monica Goyal for itbusiness.ca explains, "in places like Ontario, most of our regulations around technology are enacted years after the technology comes about, and almost always for the protection of the public." Indeed, the legal institution is one of the slowest to respond to change in our world; so while Google and other great companies are changing the way humans interact with their world, the laws are often very slow to catch up. And it could very well be the case that the lack of legal regulations for such wearable technology as they relate to vehicles could render the technology obsolete before it even has a chance to hit the marketplace.

These are interim tools is because they will provide a particular kind of functional connectivity to your vehicle, but one that will be obsolete once vehicles learn to drive fully on their own, and the human driver is no longer needed. Vehicles will then have their own very sophisticated navigational systems that will make redundant an external device for driving, such as Google Glass, etc. In fact, the future of vehicles will completely change the way humans interact with and drive in vehicles, simply because they will be fully self-driving and not requiring any kind of human intervention for its control or destination once it has been programmed.

Here are just a few examples of the fusion of automobiles and smart technology.

Hyundai Blue Link