As ever more stringent air quality legislation threatens to ban older cars from some of our inner cities, the authors of a recent study into driverless cars hint at a further curb to our enjoyment…
There’s no stopping driverless cars, it seems, but who really wants them? Well, according to a survey by IAMRoadSmart over 65% of its members believe that a human should always be in control of the vehicle and we expect that’s the belief of most British motorists.
Yet, the fact that nobody really wants them is unlikely to halt their future introduction. Indeed, it’s reported that the government is due to consult this summer on how the UK can lead the development of autonomous vehicles and with this comes a warning for us car enthusiasts who love and cherish our vehicles and enjoy nothing more than jumping behind the wheel and driving them whenever we can.
According to IAMRoadSmart technological advances that make driving safer for all road users have to be embraced whole-heartedly. However, rather scarily they see a time when motorists might be restricted to driving on designated roads and this wouldn’t go down at all well with British motorists who want to preserve the “right to drive.”
So where’s all this leading to? Will we one day share the roads with cars driven by a computer? Being purely speculative here, it might transpire that driving per se might be outlawed in many years to come and cars with a steering wheel relegated to museums or kept as purely static playthings. Far fetched? Let’s hope so.
What do you think?
Ian
The opinions expressed here are the personal opinions of the author and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of VW Heritage
[Sorry to put a dampener on the article, but there is no “right to drive” a motor vehicle on public roads. Anyone wanting to drive a motor vehicle on a public road has to have a suitable licence to do so, and that licence can be removed if the driver breaks the rules too often.]
Driverless cars will be very interesting though. Because they will try to avoid crashing as much as possible, they will be easy targets for human drivers playing games of “chicken”. Travelling in a driverless car amongst human drivers may well become very tedious and slow, as the humans take risks forcing the risk-averse driverless cars to keep taking avoiding action.
In fact it is quite likely that driverless car software will need to be programmed to take risks just like human drivers do, and thus to crash roughly as often as humans do. Whether this will be politically acceptable (we’re OK with humans in control of cars killing other humans at current rates, but what if machines are in control?) is debateable.
Back on topic, I expect driverless cars will soon learn all about classic motor vehicles, and will not be a threat even if an old car misfires badly when pulling out of a side road, or a VW splitty camper approaches with poor braking ability!
Hi, yes, you’re right. The mind boggles as to how sharing the road with driverless cars might all work and some of the situations you’ve described could certainly prove interesting. Maybe there will be several settings in driverless cars; ‘safe’ ‘normal’ and ‘hell, let’s just get there!’I guess the thing with humans is that they are ultimately totally unpredictable so a driverless car, as you say, will forever be second guessing and probably be taking evasive action even when it’s not needed. A short journey in a busy, built-up area with lots of potential hazards could take ages!