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Over the past 15 years, the upper end of the automotive world has given us driver aids and active safety technologies that were once regarded as science fiction as the quirky telephone box used by Dr. Who for time and space travel. As for the next big thing in the industry, that is the autonomous car.
That concept has been around with us since the early 20th century. A recent landmark moment for autonomous driving is when Mercedes-Benz built a driverless car through the EUREKA Prometheus project. Nowadays, autonomous vehicles are using more hi-tech stuff like computer vision, radar sensors, lidar remote sensing and GPS. But a mass produced self-driving vehicle poses a number of delicate questions for traffic participants.
What if the electronic brain of a car fails at a given moment and mortally injures a child on the sidewalk? Who should take the blame: the vehicle or the human that told the car to travel to destination X? This is only one of the most debated subjects that question the morality of what might happen when self-driving cars go horribly wrong. These fears are also found in two thirds of British motorists that are against government plans to allow driverless "Robo Cars" on British roads by January 2015.
Smart Witness has surveyed 1,000 British motorists about this delicate matter, finding out that 66.2 percent of the questioned are worried or against this driverless tech let loose on public roads. Managing director Simon Marsh said: "Two thirds of motorists said that the Government was premature in allowing driverless cars on U.K. roads and that more tests were needed to ensure the safety of the new technology."
“Also there were concerns raised about liability and whether these vehicles could be insured because computer error could easily be called into question on any incident involving a driverless car. As a result nearly nine out of ten motorists called for incident cameras to be compulsory in these so-called Robo Cars so that there would be clear evidence of which vehicle was at fault in the event of a collision,” Mr. Marsh concluded.
At the present moment, a lot of automakers are hard at work researching and developing this technology. Just to name a few, these are Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Nissan, Infiniti, Ford, Opel, Volkswagen and Honda. Even Google has joined the previously mentioned with the Self-Driving Car project. On an ending note, those of you that have seen Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey might remember that scene when HAL9000 refuses Dave Bowman's command to open the pod bay doors. Makes you wonder, huh?
What if the electronic brain of a car fails at a given moment and mortally injures a child on the sidewalk? Who should take the blame: the vehicle or the human that told the car to travel to destination X? This is only one of the most debated subjects that question the morality of what might happen when self-driving cars go horribly wrong. These fears are also found in two thirds of British motorists that are against government plans to allow driverless "Robo Cars" on British roads by January 2015.
Smart Witness has surveyed 1,000 British motorists about this delicate matter, finding out that 66.2 percent of the questioned are worried or against this driverless tech let loose on public roads. Managing director Simon Marsh said: "Two thirds of motorists said that the Government was premature in allowing driverless cars on U.K. roads and that more tests were needed to ensure the safety of the new technology."
“Also there were concerns raised about liability and whether these vehicles could be insured because computer error could easily be called into question on any incident involving a driverless car. As a result nearly nine out of ten motorists called for incident cameras to be compulsory in these so-called Robo Cars so that there would be clear evidence of which vehicle was at fault in the event of a collision,” Mr. Marsh concluded.
At the present moment, a lot of automakers are hard at work researching and developing this technology. Just to name a few, these are Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Nissan, Infiniti, Ford, Opel, Volkswagen and Honda. Even Google has joined the previously mentioned with the Self-Driving Car project. On an ending note, those of you that have seen Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey might remember that scene when HAL9000 refuses Dave Bowman's command to open the pod bay doors. Makes you wonder, huh?
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