Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere

Christian Wolmar

• Publisher: London Publishing Partnership
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781907994777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Automotive Transportation & Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Driverless cars are the future. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. Almost daily there are media stories about how we will soon all be able to rip up our driving licences, sit in the back seat and let the car take us around. But is this really going to happen? Christian Wolmar has dug behind the hype and found a very different story. We are nowhere near this driverless utopia. Indeed it may prove to be impossible to reach. And even if it were achievable, does anyone want it? Far from reducing traffic and pollution, millions of zombie cars on the roads would make them worse. Wolmar looks at the technical and other difficulties that make this driverless future a very uncertain proposition. He finds that it is the tech companies and the auto manufacturers who are desperate to get us out of the driving seat, and argues that far from making the roads safer, driverless cars may well make them more dangerous. This entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future's purported benefits.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere

Series editor: Diane Coyle

The BRIC Road to Growth — Jim O’Neill

Reinventing London — Bridget Rosewell

Rediscovering Growth: After the Crisis
— Andrew Sentance

Why Fight Poverty? — Julia Unwin

Identity Is The New Money — David Birch

Housing: Where’s the Plan? — Kate Barker

Bad Habits, Hard Choices: Using the Tax
System to Make Us Healthier — David Fell

A Better Politics: How Government Can Make
Us Happier — Danny Dorling

Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No
Transport Policy — Christian Wolmar

Travel Fast or Smart? A Manifesto for an
Intelligent Transport Policy — David Metz

Britain’s Cities, Britain’s Future — Mike Emmerich

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We
Understand To Money That Understands Us — David Birch

The Weaponization of Trade: The Great Unbalancing of Politics and Economics — Rebecca Harding and Jack Harding

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere — Christian Wolmar

Driverless Cars:
On a Road to Nowhere

Christian Wolmar

London Publishing Partnership

Copyright © 2018 Christian Wolmar

Published by London Publishing Partnership
www.londonpublishingpartnership.co.uk

Published in association with
Enlightenment Economics
www.enlightenmenteconomics.com

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-907994-77-7 (epub)

A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

This book has been composed in Candara

Copy-edited and typeset by
T&T Productions Ltd, London
www.tandtproductions.com

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1

The myth of motoring freedom

Chapter 2

The hard sell

Chapter 3

The triple revolution

Chapter 4

What can cars do now?

Chapter 5

Bumps in the road

Chapter 6

Who will drive the Queen?

Endnotes

Photo credits

Preface

While researching this book, I came across an email I had sent in 2013 about an article on driverless cars in the Evening Standard. My wife, Deborah Maby, had sent me a link to the article, and after reading the piece I dashed off a reply to her: ‘Fascinating. This is going to happen.’

The article, by the paper’s comment editor Andrew Neather, was a classic piece of futuristic optimism about how we would all soon be travelling seamlessly in driver­less cars while tapping away on our smartphones or reading the Financial Times on ‘roads packed with other self-driving pods’.

The piece was published to mark the arrival of the first ‘robot-car’ in Britain – a Nissan Leaf fitted with a variety of cameras and sensors – and it suggested that the driverless Leaf would soon be seen spinning round the streets of Oxford.

My hasty and unthinking response to my wife’s email was very much in keeping with the zeitgeist. As soon as news started to emerge of Google’s efforts to create a driverless car, a widespread assumption that we would all be using them in the relatively near future took hold. Articles began to appear almost daily in the press about the next trial of the technology, or about the investment being made by government, all in the assumed context that these things would soon become a reality. Every test, every announcement, every government initiative was hailed as a new dawn in transport technology. There was a tone of inevitability in all this coverage that soon began to permeate through to the politicians. Phrases such as ‘the upcoming driverless car revolution’ and ‘the disappearance of the privately owned car’ started to pepper their speeches. Some even assumed that the advent of driverless cars was imminent and that transport policies therefore needed to be adapted urgently. The driverless car revolution was upon us, and those who ignored it were simply doing the three monkeys trick. They were Luddites, losers. Had not the PC, the smartphone and the internet already changed our lives? ‘Smart cities’ were all the rage and driverless cars were one of their obvious key building blocks.

Judging by my response to Deborah’s email, I had clearly swallowed this line too. But then my brain started to engage. It was precisely that tone of inevitability which began to make me wonder whether this revolution in transport would really soon be upon us. Hold on a second, I thought: is this really something that is bound to happen? I began to consider the issues raised by the concept of driverless cars (or rather, as I have used throughout this book, autonomous cars). I began to think about the processes through which they would need to be introduced and about the implications if they were. Lots of questions came to mind. And as I sought answers, more doubts were raised. What was the technology currently capable of? Were there really driverless cars on the roads in the United States? Were they really safer? How would people react to their introduction? Why was there so much interest in the concept? What were the employment consequences?

Then there were questions about the projects and events that were being mentioned in the media. Were driverless cars really being used in Greenwich? Was it actually possible to have six lorries ‘platooning’ on the M6 without causing problems for other traffic? Why had Google radically reframed its test programme? What happened after the Tesla driver smashed into a lorry at 50 miles per hour when the vehicle was in ‘autopilot’ mode? Would it really be possible, as Google claimed, to reclaim thousands of square miles of parking lots when driverless cars were introduced? Would public transport be irredeemably wrecked by their introduction? Would the technology be affordable? You get the gist, reader, and you can no doubt pose your own questions too.

Yet the media – and the electronic media in particular – seemed to be avoiding these questions. There was simply a barrage of unquestioning techno-centric coverage that rarely – and even then barely – raised any of these issues. It’s the technology, stupid – of course this will happen. There were plenty of banner headlines about ‘driverless’ trials that, when the background was examined, turned out to be nothing of the sort. There were no ‘driverless taxis’ coasting round Pittsburgh; nor where there autonomous Nissan Leafs parading on the streets of Oxford or on the highways of Mountain View. The technology companies and auto manufacturers are reluctant to describe precisely what their products are able to do but it certainly does not match the media headlines. The world of autonomous cars is one of hype, secrecy and technological determinism that has so far not been challenged.

The Evening Standard was in fact rather atypical in that it did raise some crucial issues about employment and the problems with technology, and it expressed doubts about the feasibility of the concept. However, it failed to say that the Nissan Leaf would in fact be confined to a test track and a limit of 12 miles per hour, or that it would always have a person in the driving seat. In fact, as this book reveals, until very recently, all the ‘driverless’ car trials involved vehicles with a test driver able to take over control when there was a perceived risk, or were restricted to small discrete circuits. In November 2017 Google’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary, Waymo, announced it was testing vehicles without anyone at the controls in a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona. However, no details of when or precisely where they would operate were forthcoming. In the United Kingdom, the two main testing grounds – Greenwich, in southeast London, and Milton Keynes – involve pods driving on pavements at very slow speeds, obviously through fear that they are not ready to mix it with the hurly burly of roads.

I began to ask many questions, and an email conversation with John Adams, a geography professor and a leading theorist on risk compensation, spurred me on to raise issues that were even more fundamental. Issues such as how autonomous vehicles would cope with pedestrians on the road? Or cyclists? How would they distinguish between a traffic jam and a line of parked cars? Would they be programmed to never break the law, such as speed limits? Or, more controversially, would they be allowed to drive illegally? Would ‘bad people’ or pranksters be able to stop the cars at will, or would they be programmed to run them over? Would they be programmed to drive into a wall to avoid hitting pedestrians? Would the urban realm have to be completely redesigned? In this book I have tried to provide some of the answers, or at least to frame the questions in the right way.

When I put these questions to academics working on the development of autonomous vehicles, their answers were expressed in far less confident terms than implied by the stories in the media. The advocates, when pushed, admitted that the task ahead was rather more difficult than had been assumed. There was even an admission from some that the introduction of these vehicles was taking place far more slowly than predicted by articles like that Evening Standard one from 2013. Indeed, at the moment there is no such thing as a driverless car, as I mentioned above. My test of true driverlessness is a vehicle that would be capable of taking a passenger to their office before returning home to whisk the kids to school. Indeed, we are nowhere near that. It is decades away and it may never be possible because of some of the issues raised in this book. The obstacles – technological, social, practical, economic, regulatory, legal – are legion.

This book is not born of my love of trains and bicycles. I am admittedly an avowed and much-published fan of trains and public transport generally, but this is an objective assessment of the potential of the driverless car as a transport ‘solution’. I recognize that cars have a vital role to play in our transport system, and that will remain so for the foreseeable future. However, what is being proposed as a technological solution is, in fact, a highly political concept, and a deeply controversial one at that. As I suggest in the final chapter, there are solutions...