Self-driving vehicles face a bumpy ride

Technology must be embraced if we are to drive down road fatalities, says David Williams
New-age car: the self-parking BMW i3 is controlled via a Samsung smartwatch

One of the great promises of the driverless — “autonomous” — car is that it will cut road accidents. Because you can trust a machine to take the same, correct, action time after time after time, right?

Only up to a point, and BMW sales chief Ian Robertson, whose firm is one of those at the forefront of self-drive cars, raised the subject last week. At a meeting in London with journalists,he pointed out that even machines are not completely infallible.

In real-life scenarios, he said, they will sometimes be left with so few choices that they will have no option but to crash. And who will be to blame then? Look at it this way. If a car is driving itself carefully along and a cyclist unexpectedly swerves out of a side turning into its path, while a pram-pushing mother who’s crossing the road blocks the only alternative ‘escape route’, which should the car’s on-board computer decide to crash into if it can’t stop in time? It’s a tough choice, and one that is taxing all ‘self-drive’ players in the motor industry. It’s a heavy social and ethical responsibility; at some point a car firm will face a massive lawsuit, with a litigant claiming the vehicle made the ‘wrong’ decision.

This week, a report by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute reiterates the case that self-driving cars won’t be a panacea for road deaths, adding they could actually worsen road safety for other drivers during the long transition period.

Researchers Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle say the “expectation of zero fatalities with self-driving vehicles is not realistic”.

It warns of a dangerous “transition” period on the basis that drivers today often use eye contact and visual feedback from other road users. This will be absent in interactions with self-driving vehicles, potentially worsening road safety for conventional drivers.

The report points out that current self-driving car prototypes are not able to cope with fog, snow or heavy rain because of the limitations of sensing technology. The authors question the ability of an autonomous vehicle to negotiate unusual road users such as horses or situations where police or construction crews direct traffic.

Commenting on the report, The European Safety Transport Council concludes that it’s important to cut through the “hype” surrounding self-driving vehicles and remain focused on how we can save lives this year, not just in 10 or 20 years.

But we’ve only reached a point where the autonomous car is almost here because car-makers have been focusing on driver-assistance technologies.

You might argue that self-drive started with headlights that ‘knew’ when to dip, windscreen wipers that ‘knew’ when it was raining, followed by automatic traction control systems, adaptive cruise control, the self-parking BMW i3 electric car summoned by commands on a Samsung smartwatch, blind spot monitoring systems and autonomous emergency braking.

Many of these applications are in service today — no doubt saving lives daily. Yes, there will be challenges, but the latest figures show a four per cent rise in deaths on UK roads in the year to September 2014, almost exclusively caused by human error.

Now it’s time to move towards a target of zero deaths with technology (and more road police) leading the charge.

Follow David Williams on Twitter at @djrwilliams

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