UK.gov quietly slips extra cash to self-driving car trials The UK government is adding another £9m to the pot for driverless car trials in Blighty, allowing four cities to start the tests next year instead of three. Although it didn’t feature in Chancellor George Osborne’s speech, the Autumn Statement said the UK is adding the extra funds into the previously announced £10m competition …
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I hope these four "lucky" guinea pig areas were chosen, because of the high calibre of drivers who will have gathered sufficient intelligence from dodging pedestrians / cyclists / taxi drivers to be able to add "driverless" cars to their list.
" helping to deepen our understanding of the IMPACT on road users and wider society,"
My caps; I think impact may become a frequently used word regarding the use of autonomous cars in somewhere like Greenwich.
Unless it has changed radically for the better in the years since I moved out of Britain it is going in at the deep end for a new technology.
Traffic density, calming measures in every back street and on some of the more major roads plus the problems generated whenever the slightest incident closes the Blackwall tunnel.
Greenwich is a challenge for a human driver with reasonable experience never mind a computer with a less than human flexibility.
I wonder if the gov' will insist on legislation to give robocars right of way or add robo lanes to the already despised bus lanes.
South London used to have it's fair share of road rage I can just imagine the response to a driverless car imacting somebody's pride and joy after they have tried to zip in front of it.
Just for the record ' They can pry my steering wheel and gear stick from my cold dead hands.'
Even if I believed that the technology is sufficiently advanced to make this concept even slightly feasible .. which I don't .. the law is and common practice is so very far out from where it would need to be. This same topic was discussed on one of the IET forums and the number of legal and practical issues aired was staggering. Some from those quite close to the subject. The number of accidents on UK roads has been in a steady decline for decades now. Citing "Road Safety" as a reason to deploy this technology is at best disingenuous.
For a start, the first "Driverless Vehicles" aren't. You have a normal driving seat with all the usual controls, and a kind of "Cruise Control on Steroids" button. However, if the autodrive decides that try as it might it can't see a way out of this situation, it just dumps control back to the hapless driver. All this means is that the driver who has been musing to the radio, is all of sudden dropped back to reality with a situation the automation can't resolve and a split second to resolve it in. Sounds like the very definition of "Set up to Fail". Oh and as the driver was legally in control, it's their fault when they plough into the other vehicle/pedestrian/nuclear power station. The driver-bot is figuratively looking at the sky and whistling innocently.
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