London - Try as I might, I cannot see the attraction of driverless cars.
This week the UK Government launched four trial schemes in Greenwich, Coventry, Bristol and Milton Keynes at a cost of £19 million (R342 million).
“Driverless vehicle technology has the potential to be a real game changer on the UK's roads,” promised the transport minister Claire Perry, “altering the face of motoring in the most fundamental of ways and delivering major benefits for road safety”.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Driverless cars might prove a boon to over-the-limit drivers, or those with failing eyesight or extreme fatigue, but the most “fundamental” thing about motoring is the interaction between the sophisticated machine and the person at the controls. Having the machine do everything for you, prompted and guided by supposedly foolproof sensors, cameras and “lidars”, will leave the once-proud driver feel like a hapless baby, ferried about by powers beyond his control.
WHO IS ACCOUNTABLE?
There's one important consideration Perry didn't mention. Professor Stephen Glaister, head of the RAC Foundation, put it like this: “Alongside the hi-tech innovation you need policy decisions on long-term, low-tech matters such as who takes responsibility if things go wrong.” In other words, whose fault is it when a driverless car crashes into a driven one? Will the manufacturers claim the driverless one is infallible because its sensors and radar can't go wrong? And what happens when two of them crash into each other? The only “game changer” I can predict is in the battles between insurance companies.
I love innovation but sometimes I wonder how long it will take consumers to return to their old ways. The news that sales of Ordnance Survey maps are rising for the first time in five years delights me because it means motorists have realised how they've relied overmuch on satnavs that leave them stranded in the middle of Norfolk when they're heading for Northampton.
I suspect early adoptors of driverless cars may find themselves travelling a similarly retrogressive road in much less than five years.
The Independent