Do you find this scary?
Posted: Tue Apr 25, 2017 10:27 am
I read a news article today that I find pretty perplexing for those of us who love driving. It's about the new scheme to test autonomous cars between London and Oxford within a couple of years.
What do you think about the way things are heading? These paragraphs are part of the article.
"At a recent conference on connected cars Direct Line, Britain’s biggest motor insurer, warned that driving by humans might “increasingly become a luxury pursuit”. Insurance premiums will be far higher for those who drive themselves, and correspondingly lower for cars with growing levels of automation.
“Absolutely, we will push people in that direction,” said Gus Park, the insurer’s managing director for motor and business development, although he cautioned: “We’re going to be in a pretty complicated mixed environment for some time.” He compared the period ahead to when horse-drawn vehicles were withdrawn from main roads."
"Paul Newman, the founder of Oxbotica, which will run the Oxford-London trials and developed the autonomous technology used by the Greenwich pod, said the question would be: at what point does the government have a duty of care to intervene in the face of statistics that are likely to show human drivers cause thousands of deaths a year? Newman pointed out that governments have answered this question before by enforcing the wearing of seatbelts.
Incentives and controls are perhaps more likely than an outright ban – rather like smoking, driving may become increasingly costly and permitted in ever fewer places. Thorny questions of prohibition may be dodged in favour of licensing fast lanes for connected self-driving cars, for example; or creating urban zones where shared autonomous vehicles of some description become the only mode of transport."
"The consensus among those thinking about the driverless future is that social attitudes and politics will keep humans in the driving seat for a decade or two longer than technology requires. But eventually, beyond enthusiasts on private roads, tending a beloved antique, is the car driver heading the way of the dodo?"
Basically I suspect that "decade or two longer" will very quickly shrink as the force of big money sees huge huge profit in producing autonomous vehicles, and the safety and insurance lobbies jump on this politically forcing the timescale even tighter.
So how will we preserve the right to enjoy and celebrate the automotive past, while "tending our beloved antique"?
What do you all think?
What do you think about the way things are heading? These paragraphs are part of the article.
"At a recent conference on connected cars Direct Line, Britain’s biggest motor insurer, warned that driving by humans might “increasingly become a luxury pursuit”. Insurance premiums will be far higher for those who drive themselves, and correspondingly lower for cars with growing levels of automation.
“Absolutely, we will push people in that direction,” said Gus Park, the insurer’s managing director for motor and business development, although he cautioned: “We’re going to be in a pretty complicated mixed environment for some time.” He compared the period ahead to when horse-drawn vehicles were withdrawn from main roads."
"Paul Newman, the founder of Oxbotica, which will run the Oxford-London trials and developed the autonomous technology used by the Greenwich pod, said the question would be: at what point does the government have a duty of care to intervene in the face of statistics that are likely to show human drivers cause thousands of deaths a year? Newman pointed out that governments have answered this question before by enforcing the wearing of seatbelts.
Incentives and controls are perhaps more likely than an outright ban – rather like smoking, driving may become increasingly costly and permitted in ever fewer places. Thorny questions of prohibition may be dodged in favour of licensing fast lanes for connected self-driving cars, for example; or creating urban zones where shared autonomous vehicles of some description become the only mode of transport."
"The consensus among those thinking about the driverless future is that social attitudes and politics will keep humans in the driving seat for a decade or two longer than technology requires. But eventually, beyond enthusiasts on private roads, tending a beloved antique, is the car driver heading the way of the dodo?"
Basically I suspect that "decade or two longer" will very quickly shrink as the force of big money sees huge huge profit in producing autonomous vehicles, and the safety and insurance lobbies jump on this politically forcing the timescale even tighter.
So how will we preserve the right to enjoy and celebrate the automotive past, while "tending our beloved antique"?
What do you all think?
