...DRIVERLESS CARS GUESS WHO I HAD IN MY CAB LAST WEEK - NOBODY!!
It’s 2am and it’s rain- ing and you are stranded in town. You pull out your phone and tap on the Uber app. The online cab hire company’s famil- iar map appears on the screen, showing a dozen taxis circling your location. You choose one and five minutes later it arrives. So far, so familiar to thousands of people who often use the service. But then you notice one big differ- ence: when the car pulls up, it has no driver. You validate your identity via the app and hop in the back, and the cab takes you home - autonomously.
It sounds like science
fiction, but a deal struck in America between Uber and the state of Arizona brings the scenario far closer to reality than you might think. Under the agreement Uber is likely to become the first company to test autonomous cars in public without having a human driver pres- ent - a safety net that rivals, including Google, have so far had to deploy.
As a Sunday Times report highlights, the development should strike fear into the hearts of taxi firm bosses across the world. Already smart- ing from being undercut by Uber’s current system, tradi-
tional cabbies now face being killed off altogether. According to Uber, driverless cabs will slash the cost of hir- ing a taxi and bring in a new era of person- alised transport in cities. So we could soon routinely see thousands of driver- less vehicles circling cities and being hailed remotely by people going about their daily business. In fact, jettisoning the need to have a human “backup” driver overcomes a key paradox of dri- verless cars: as things stand - outside Arizona - even if you had an autonomous vehicle, you would still need to be pres-
ent and alert at the steering wheel, rather than, say, reading a newspaper in the back.
Owners would also still have to deal with the familiar problems of having a car, such as finding a parking space at the shop- ping centre and being stuck in traffic. A dri- verless cab would allow people to alight at any point In the journey and go. If it all seems fanciful, consider this: the DfT is drawing up a com- prehensive code of practice that will allow the real-world testing of auto- nomous cars. lt will be published in spring. The govern- ment has also
promised a full review of legislation by the summer of 2017, which will include an overhaul of the High- way Code and adjustments to the MoT test. However, the DfT stresses that in all tests of the dri- verless technology the vehicle will be supervised by a qual- ified test driver. America is even fur- ther down the road towards the legalisa- tion of driverless vehicles. Doug Ducey, the governor of Arizona, recently announced an execu- tive order calling for pilot programmes of self-driving vehicles “regardless if the operator is physically present in the vehicle
or is providing direc- tion remotely”. Ducey’s executive order requires that Arizona’s driverless vehicle pilot pro- grammes take place on the campuses of public universities such as the Universi- ty of Arizona. lt also directs the state’s agencies to “under- take any necessary steps to support the testing and operation of self-driving vehi- cles on public roads within Arizona”. This means that when Uber does reveal its self-driving taxi, it will be able to ferry pay- ing customers around the university legally from day one. And that moment may not be so far off.
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