Driverless cars are overhyped, and their progress reported in a nonsensical way. Want proof? Yesterday, The Times ran a story on its front page under the headline, "Driverless cars on UK roads by end of the year", claiming that the government was progressing to allow fully automated cars to be tested without safety drivers onboard this year.
The same writer wrote the same story for The Times in March 2018, just eleven months ago, heralding, "Driverless cars on UK roads this year after rules relaxed". One of these years, the story is bound to be right.
But not this year. Fully automated cars without a safety driver will not be on UK roads in 2019. Then why the many headlines squealing otherwise? It's complicated.
The story in The Times explains the government is working on approving "advanced trials", in which there's no human safety driver on board or connected remotely – that's absolutely true; it was announced as part of an update to a code of practice on automated car trials. But The Times claims the trials would happen by the end of this year, which the Department for Transport (DfT) says is not likely to happen. A spokesperson for the DfT says they don’t really know when that date will be, adding that it’s still early days.
But even if an approval process for advanced trials of driverless cars was cobbled together before year end, it's not a given that any projects would meet the "rigorous safety assessments" required by the government, though David Hynd, chief scientist and head of connected and autonomous cars for transport research group TRL, says there are a number of groups considering advanced trials in the UK. The company furthest along with automated cars is Alphabet – but its Waymo cars still need safety drivers in case of rain. ""America, and particularly Waymo, and to some extent the other companies, are so far ahead that whatever we're likely to do is just following in their footsteps," says Christian Wolmar, author of Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere. "Despite the fact they're so far ahead, they are nowhere near doing what this legislation [the code of practice] pretends that we're close to doing, which is having cars with no controller in an open environment."
Given all this, why the headlines promising driverless cars this year? The confusion may be exacerbated by the government's continued insistence that commercial driverless cars will hit British roads by 2021. If that were likely, we'd want advanced trials in place as soon as possible, meaning that having a process in place to approve such trials this year would be a wise move indeed.
Trials of self-driving cars are, of course, already happening. The newly updated code of practice that sparked these stories makes it clear that driverless car tests are allowed in the UK, so long as a safety driver is in the car or it's being monitored remotely, with the ability to halt or control the vehicle.
So far, the various automated car projects haven't achieved driverless nirvana: level five. There's six levels of automation in cars, though the key ones are level four and level five – mostly automated and fully automated. A vehicle that's only mostly automated will need human intervention from time to time, such as the Waymo One in the rain, or will need to be used in specific, controlled situations, such as Heathrow's pods, where there's little risk of pedestrians wandering across the track.
The UK could have driverless cars by 2021, but only if policymakers shift the goalposts enough and redefine what the term means. "It comes down to operational design domain," says Hynd. "That's the area where you're going to operate the vehicle." If automation is limited to specific use cases, such as cruise control in dedicated lanes on a motorway, we could have limited driverless features in cars soon enough; while that could help reduce accidents, questions have been raised about how to safely hand over the wheel from the car to an inattentive driver.
And if automated vehicles are limited to pods slowly ferrying people between transport hubs, those too could be available soon, as the reduced speeds mean they can travel on the pavement and limit risks. "That's a lot less complex than having an autonomous vehicle that could operate anywhere in the UK," Hynd says. "That would take longer." In other words, if you're picturing the car in your garage driving you everywhere from congested urban streets to rural roads without needing to put a human hand on the wheel, that's some time away.
The hype raises concerns that the government's self-enforced deadline could see an unfinished technology hit our roads before it's been properly tested, leading to incidents like the Uber crash in Arizona that killed Elaine Herzberg, says Wolmar. "We should tread much more carefully because politicians might be tempted to push through the safety procedures before [cars are] ready. And then we get what happened in Arizona."
Kirsty Lloyd-Jukes disagrees. She's the CEO of Latent Logic, which is part of a wider project to develop certification for self-driving cars. While the government is talking about advanced trials, it's also discussing with industry and academia on how to certify self-driving cars as roadworthy. That will include submissions from the manufacturer, as well as on-road tests and virtual simulations, says Lloyd-Jukes – they'll have to pass a driving test much tougher than the one humans take. "It can sound really scary to people to have self-driving cars on the road without safety drivers," she says. "But that will be at the end of a really robust set of tests. The key motivation for everyone in the industry is to increase road safety."
Even if level-five driverless cars aren't here by 2021, getting regulation ready for when – or if – they appear is sensible, says Lloyd-Jukes. “That gives us the best opportunity to influence what happens on a global level,” she adds. "We want to make sure that the right regulations get put in place to test these vehicles… and the best way of doing that is being part of the dialogue."
Perhaps an annual headline that driverless cars will be on British roads this year is one way to keep the discussion moving, but reality suggests we have many more years to wait. "This is cart-before-the-horse stuff – we are nowhere near ready to have cars whizzing around our streets without a driver or some remote controller," says Wolmar. "This is pretending we're open to technology that doesn't exist."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
