Plans For Driverless Cars On Our Roads
Saturday, 16. February 2019
If you ever fly from Gatwick Airport and travel there by train you will arrive at the South Terminal. If you then have to get to the North Terminal you jump on the very efficient shuttle that travels between the two terminals. It’s all electric, it’s driverless and it travels on rails at a speed just north of a healthy walking pace.
And even then, in the firm knowledge that no-one can step in front of the train, there are no road signs to read, no traffic lights to watch or emergency road works to negotiate I still get nervous. So it was a shocking injection of reality to find that there are very serious plans to move the UK to the front of the driverless car development by proposing legislation that would allow self-driving cars loose on our roads.
Trials have been taking place since 2015 in parts of London, Milton Keynes, Bristol and Coventry but not to the levels being proposed by the Department for Transport who have probably never sat on the Gatwick shuttle. To date all cars had to have a driver in the car when being trialled but proposed new legislation will allow completely driverless cars to be trialled on public roads without a rail in sight.
They believe that there will be completely driverless cars available by 3035 with the industry worth £52 billion in the UK and £907 million globally – could I have hit on the real reason for wanting to be first out of the blocks. Matthew Avery from Thatcham Research who have a bit of knowledge about car safety said, ‘Safety must not be compromised to achieve leadership position’.
And if you are really looking for assurances and comfort the DfT said that companies and organisations wishing to conduct driverless trials must liaise with police and local authorities, and experiments must be paused, scaled down or stopped ‘during investigations or following an incident’. So if I understand that remark they are expecting ‘incidents’, how reassuring is that?
Call me old fashioned but this is one development that I’m certainly not looking forward to! By Graham Hill
