In August 1882, an excitable bunch of investors and engineers lugged a couple of cases of champagne into a chalk tunnel: nothing surprising there. Investors and engineers are notoriously excitable, but they were also subscribers to the Anglo-French Submarine Railway Company, which was committed to digging a tunnel under the English Channel, so the event was certainly significant. By March the following year, they had successfully excavated 6,037 feet of chalk, but then they stopped (the British Army thought their tunnel would make England too vulnerable to invasion). Work began again in 1973 but was promptly cancelled (ironically) because of concerns about EEC membership, only to be re-imagined subsequently as a private project in 1988: and, hey presto, trains began running between England and France in 1994, more than 110 years after tunnelling began (with 80% cost overruns making HS2 look like a Hornby train set). So, what do we deduce from this too much prolonged technological adventure?
Well, for a start, we deduce that innovation, powered by human imagination, always runs on a faster track than the raw capacity of current technology. Kennedy challenged mankind to land on the moon in 1962, but it took the best part of a decade to get there; William Harkins explained the basics of (environmentally clean) nuclear fusion in 1921, but it took until 2022 to achieve it (www.iter.org), and Elon Musk…well Elon Musk is always too far ahead of the curve to make any sort of sense to anyone.
So it was at least curious that this week the UK Transport Secretary (Mark Harper, if you didn’t know), should choose to announce that Driverless Cars will be gliding gracefully along Britain’s roads within the next two years, allowing the UK to capture a £42 Billion share of future self-driving markets in the process (within a decade). Let’s leave aside the awkward political reality that Mr Harper’s party may not actually be in power by 2026 and focus instead on his claims that autonomous vehicles will significantly enhance road safety, increase personal mobility, and act as a turbocharger for domestic economic expansion (see above).
Take safety to start with: it’s certainly true that driverless vehicles are intended to replace human decision-making with a set of more reliable sensors and chips, enabling the car to model a route for itself in a manner that’s far more efficient than your average blood and bones driver (www.smartcitiesdive.com): added to which, autonomous vehicles don’t get tired or (occasionally) drunk. A driverless car can also communicate vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) or vehicle-to-infrastructure (bridges and barriers to you and me, or V2I), and then adjust its progress to avoid crashing into them, or at least that’s the theory.
Google’s prototype vehicle has already been involved in eleven accidents on public roads, and between May and September of 2022 alone, eleven road deaths were attributed to automated vehicles (ten of them involving Tesla cars (see above again), and one the prototype Ford Pickup Truck: www.nhtsa.gov). Plus, road testing for autonomous vehicles has almost always been conducted in low-speed, low-traffic environments, which doesn’t sound much like the conditions we’re likely to encounter day to day on the M1 or Hanger Lane Gyratory system.
So the jury’s still out on safety…
Those with mobility issues stand to benefit enormously from driverless cars: a blind person could travel alone to the shops, those with functional disabilities could do the same and more, and a whole new world of opportunities opens up for them. But we’ve just seen how complex the real-world challenges of autonomous driving can be (and still are), so ask yourself: if you’re blind or can’t control a steering column, would you happily sit back and relax on your way to the shops with just the car in charge? That’s a real-world issue, too, and it makes the second of Mr Harper’s promises look like so much pie in the sky…at least for the moment.
This one’s much easier: whoever first develops a reliably safe, prescient, automated vehicle stands to rake in riches like Croesus: that’s why all of the titans of technology (Google and Tesla amongst them) have been working on their prototypes for at least the last twenty years, but the technical challenges are still complex and the endgame a distant horizon: as we’ve said already, imaginative innovation always runs ahead of technological capability (hence the optimistic champagne party in 1882).
Mr Harper, therefore, might think seriously about recalibrating his clock…
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