Reference no: EM133217303
Qualitative analysis:
Expert interviews for Tesla company: What are the problems with self-driving cars that we need to work through in the next 5-10 years?
We interview 20 experts and below is just one interview response.
- Discuss the three steps of qualitative analysis (apply).
- Please see the interview response below. Identifying discrete points and codes.
- Provide analysis and business recommendations for Tesla.
Interview response:
As with any innovation, self-driving cars bring with them a lot of technical issues, but there are moral ones as well. Namely, there are no clear parameters for how safe is considered safe enough to put a self-driving car on the road. At the federal level in the United States, guidelines in place are voluntary, and across states, the laws vary. If and when parameters are defined, there's no set standard for measuring whether they're met.
Human-controlled driving today is already a remarkably safe activity - in the United States, there is approximately one death for every 100 million miles driven. Self-driving cars would, presumably, need to do better than that, which is what the companies behind them say they will do. But how much better isn't an easy answer. Do they need to be 10 percent safer? 100 percent safer? And is it acceptable to wait for autonomous vehicles to meet super-high safety standards if it means more people die in the meantime?
Testing safety is another challenge. Gathering enough data to prove self-driving cars are safe would require hundreds of millions, even billions, of miles to be driven. It's a potentially enormously expensive endeavor, which is why researchers are trying to figure out other ways to validate driverless car safety, such as computer simulations and test tracks.