WHAT’S STALLING THE DRIVERLESS CAR PROJECT?

Many Questions Surrounding Autonomous Vehicles Have Yet To Be Answered

There has been a lot of talk about driverless cars over the last few years, Google is just one of the large players to have stoked the flames of interest on this topic. The tech-giant made an announcement last summer that it was to begin a limited production of a two-seater autonomous vehicle. More traditional vehicle manufacturers Audi and Daimler have since brought out a driverless car and big rig truck respectively. The move towards fully autonomous vehicles hasn’t gone completely smoothly, Google’s prototype vehicles have been involved in several road traffic accidents (although these are attributed to other motorists crashing into them) and reportedly have trouble identifying potholes in the road.

The field is still so new that neither legal experts nor the manufacturers themselves have fully worked out where responsibility for these vehicles lies. If the passenger has no way to override the autonomous system, does liability lie with the manufacturer, according to Ben Howarth, policy advisor at the Association of British Insurers, this may well be case. “If car drivers are replaced entirely by passengers who have no way of overriding or controlling the systems in the vehicle, it’s possible manufacturers would become liable in the case of accidents.” The technology behind autonomous cars relies a huge amount on sensors, lasers and radar which don’t necessarily work well in adverse conditions like fog, snow and heavy rain, how will we know if these systems are 100 percent reliable in northern hemisphere countries?

Another issue is whether autonomous vehicles are vulnerable to cyberattack. Only recently Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) was forced to recall 1.4 million cars when researchers demonstrated that hackers could take remote control of a Jeep Cherokee via its internet-connected entertainment and navigation system using a cellphone network. There are many questions around fully autonomous vehicles that remain unanswered, regulators will remain unconvinced until these issues are fully worked out. For now, the closest we’ll get to a driverless commute is as a passenger on-board an autonomous train, such as the Las Vegas Monorail in the US, or the Kobe Port Island Line in Japan.

 

Adverse weather conditions will affect driverless car radar and sensors.