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Losing control - why the dawn of autonomous vehicles is a good thing

Image of Alisdair Suttie
Author: | Updated: 11 Mar 2016 14:15

The Vienna Convention doesn’t come up very often when discussing cars. This treaty’s main purpose is to codify the notion of diplomatic immunity, but it has other implications that have a significant bearing on the introduction of autonomous vehicles to our roads.

A change to the Vienna Convention on road traffic was passed in 2014 that crucially amended the statement that a driver should be in control of a vehicle at all times. For autonomous vehicles and their developers, this was a watershed moment.

Over here in the UK, this news was perhaps less momentous as we had signed but not ratified the Vienna Convention in the first place, so were not strictly bound by it. While the UK has been happy to go along with diplomatic immunity, it wasn’t so bothered with the bit about keeping your hands on the steering wheel.

Consequently, the UK has been among the front-runners in designing and developing connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technology. It’s also why the UK has been one of the very first countries to allow road trials of CAVs, including now heavy goods vehicles.

Self driving Volvos - woman in car reading magazine

Real benefits

The benefits are clear. It’s not about the driver being able to catch up on sleep while on the commute to work but about reducing collisions, saving lives and lowering fuel use and emissions.

With the recent announcement of HGV CAV trials in the UK, it has refocused attention on one of the major tenets of autonomous vehicle use: platooning.

This is where vehicles travel in a closely packed convoy on the motorway to minimise the amount of road space they occupy and improve efficiency through better aerodynamic effect. It’s the same idea as cyclists in the Tour de France slipstreaming each other to achieve the same speed for less effort.

What happens if an autonomous vehicle does break the law? Who would be to blame?

Driving too closely to the vehicle in front is one of the most common causes of collisions in the UK, combined with driver error and inattention. Autonomous vehicles are being designed to factor out the inattentiveness of the human and, by synchronising acceleration and braking of the vehicles in the platoon, technology can make this safe.

However, this and many other facets of CAVs raise the question of whether or not existing road traffic law is up to the task of dealing with an autonomous future? We won’t get into the insurance and liability implications here as this is a whole other topic of discussion.

What we do need to look at is how the current road traffic law will cope with CAVs and how they will need to adapt. In an ideal world, for CAVs to work successfully all vehicles on the road would be connected to each other and communicate position, speed and route so they can work around each other.

Self driving Volvos - lead truck

Naughty robots

The problem here, as it is with non-CAV machines, is the human element. People are less predictable than machines and many drivers exceed the speed limit either by design or unawareness.

This raises a question about speed limit enforcement. We should all stick to the limit, but this isn’t always the case and for CAVs to blend into the traffic seamlessly, it would require the human driver to adapt and accommodate the computer-controlled vehicle.

Will drivers have to give way to a CAV or vice versa, and will there be a change in priorities at junctions, motorway slip roads, intersections and roundabouts? In short, will road traffic law change to favour CAVs and assume the human element is more likely to be at fault?

Will drivers have to give way to an autonomous vehicle or vice versa, and will there be a change in priorities at junctions?

On the other side of this is what happens if a CAV does break the law? An example of this could be temporary road works on a motorway with a reduced speed limit. While proponents of CAVs say the on-board technology will use GPS and real-time traffic data to spot such hazards, as well as traffic sign recognition, there is still a chance a CAV could continue through road works at an unabated speed.

How would the police deal with that? According to Vienna Convention until recently, the driver would be responsible regardless of whether the vehicle was in autonomous mode or not. But how do you issue a speeding ticket to a machine and when the human inside the vehicle was not in control?

A spokesperson for the Department for Transport told us: “The UK has no plans to change its road policing at present due to autonomous vehicles. We are committed to reducing injury and death on our roads and making them safer through effective policing.”

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t quite get to the nub of the issue, which is there will be two very differently controlled streams of vehicle on our roads when CAVs become part of the motoring mix.

Self driving Volvos - lead truck rear

Boredom busters

Some reckon CAVs’ primary use will be on motorways and major roads where they can remove the monotony of long journeys. This makes sense, but these are also the roads with the highest speed limits. Consequently, there are those developing CAVs who think cars controlled by the driver and those where control has been handed to the vehicle should be separated from each other.

Creating two individual flows of traffic sounds like a good solution, but then it requires more road space and that means more roads policing for a service already under considerable strain.

Autonomous vehicles are being designed to factor out the inattentiveness of the human

The benefits of connected and autonomous vehicles are many, including reduced journey times, lower fuel consumption and emissions, and improved road safety. However, there are many issues still to be addressed before they can become part of the daily motoring landscape and not least among these is how road traffic law will change to reflect this.

As one police source told us: “The problems are likely to arise not from the autonomous vehicle itself but where it meets the human element, either that inside the vehicle or those driving other vehicles.

“This means it’s not so much establishing what traffic law says but how it is applied in any given situation.”

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