Autonomous Cars

Here's some of the detail surrounding the exciting new development of self-driving cars.

Setting the bar that the autonomous car has to acheive needs to be seen in context, and clearly by many of the comments on the article it's not.

Many people seem to think that unless it can perform perfectly it shouldn't be allowed. This leaves us stuck with a less safe system, killing and maiming more.

I like to think that the bar that should be set is that it is just better than us humans, that killed 1700 people on the roads in the past year in the UK alone. At the moment it exceeds that massively!

It runs alongside the constant removal of responsibility we seem to deem acceptable by people driving. Both by insisting that more vulnerable road users should behave in a way that enables people driving to stop paying attention and by the way we constantly mollycoddle people inside cars away from their actions.

It would seem the best thing to do is completely remove responsibility and hand it over to a machine capable of making many more decisions, much quicker and without anger, impatience, or belligerence we experience when behind the wheel.