Nicholas writes,
> I would have thought that the nature of autonomous cars is that such they are > expression > of the rights of a corporation and not a barer of individual rights. Where a > jaywalker is guilty > of depriving the corporation of right to trade by wilfully impeding their > ability to deliver their > client? How far can you take the PPP model of infrastructure once the > corporation has a direct > exposure to capacity of ‘our' infrastructure to deliver profits? I do hope > that there is no real > parallel between net neutrality and what might happen to ‘our’ open roads. Well thought through, and said, Nicholas. >From dealer to scrapyard, a new car in the UK lasts an average of 13.9 years, >which is why if we bought one today, it might very well be the last car we >buy. Looking at the most recent predictions, the majority of car manufacturers >estimate the first high-to-fully automated vehicles will hit the market >between 2020-2025. They will need to be safe and to reduce pollution and congestion, and they will probably bring about a paradigm shift in personal vehicle ownership rates, which are likely to decline steeply. For example, a recent survey of car manufacturing executives by KPMG similarly revealed that 59% of industry bosses believe that more than half of all car owners today will no longer want to own a car by 2025. Instead of today’s car ownership model, we are far more likely to rely on “mobility as a service” by 2030. Imagine an Uber-like service you can summon at the touch of a button, but without a driver. Renting is not necessarily the right word – consumers will buy a service like using an Uber today, but with a wider range of vehicle configurations to suit different types of travel – family outings, long-distance sleeper travel, or shared commutes. In terms of crashes, a 2008 survey by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that human error is the critical reason for 93% of crashes. Apparently when we eliminate human error, our roads become dramatically safer: no more drink-driving, phone calls at the wheel, carelessness, inattention or just bad driving. As we are discussing here, clearly there needs to be adequate testing to ensure that AVs are acceptably safe for all road users, but then we should be able to look forward to safer roads, for road users anyway. We’re only at the start of understanding how pedestrians and cyclists will interact with a vehicle that doesn’t have a human driver at the controls. Whether a pedestrian will be able to detect whether a car is automated or not, and behave accordingly, we still don’t know. There’s a risk, initially at least, that pedestrians and cyclists may try to “test” AVs to see how they react. “In Singapore, they are currently testing autonomous vehicles in public parks and they tell us that the large majority of incidents [near misses] are not due to the vehicles malfunctioning, but to people jumping in front of the cars to test whether they stop in time,” reports the Guardian. Mixed traffic in future will carry risks associated with behavioural patterns, some of which are indeed hard to foresee. Ref: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/15/driverless-cars-12-things-you-need-to-know Cheers, Stephen _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
