A while back, we reported about how a survey conducted by Boston Consulting Group has revealed that as much as 85 percent of adult Indians are willing to ride in self-driving vehicles. But, maybe India isn't yet to ready for Self-Driving cars after all.

nuTonomy, a MIT startup, had recently decided to put self-driving cabs on the roads of Singapore. Explaining why nuTonomy chose Singapore as its test market, Karl Iagnemma, nuTonomy's CEO, said, there are four main things to consider the most in case of self-driving cars: regulatory environment, driving climate, infrastructure and the weather. Of course, traffic density also plays an important rule, but that comes under driving climate. Further, a country might have dense traffic but if its people are adhering to the rules of the roads, it will be absolutely alright.



While Singaporeans are known to abide by the road rules, drivers in the Asian cities have a notorious reputation when it comes to navigating the roads. Iagnemma even used India as an example, which is known for its chaotic traffic.

So, the question that arises here is, if the driving climate of Singapore is perfect for self-driving vehicles — will the technology ever be able to successfully work in cities that don’t boost of a good infrastructure and law-abiding drivers?

India's capital city New Delhi's traffic situation is quite dense and it’s a more fluid driving environment, that makes it unfavourable for self-driving technology to deal with since the brains behind autonomous vehicles are computers, which function on a set of rules.

Since the technology behind self-driving is completely bound to an idea of structure, it becomes a little easier to deploy the technology in a structured environment — something which Singapore has.

This means, the less structure that the city offers, the more one will have to bank on human contextualized reasoning and decision making powers, and that makes it hard. One will have to drive based on their past experience and intuition. So, in order for Iagnemma's self-driving cars to work in India, while the core technology can be the same, but it still needs a more advanced evolution of the technology in order to be able to perform less structured contextualized reasoning.

Hence, the conclusion here is, Indian roads and drivers aren't currently ready for autonomous vehicles to function successfully. In order for them to become ready in the near future, the government will have to work meticulously towards improving the conditions of the Indian roads and its world-infamous traffic.

[Top Image- Techradar]
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