The Hopeless Hype Behind AV's.

I have been a critic of autonomous vehicles for some time now and their supporters are probably (hopefully) sick of my denouncements, but recently I was asked here on Linkedin to explain my objections more fully, a task too large for the usual reply method to allow so I have outlined my objections in this blog instead.

The whole thrust of AV's has been pushed by technology companies looking to expand into the car market, it has not been demand led, car users as a whole are not hammering at the doors of Google or Tesla insisting that they churn them out by the million right here and now. Instead, the tech companies see them as merely another device, one that just happens to be fitted with wheels and are marketing them as the next big techie thing just as they did PC's and mobiles, however, there are several quite major differences.

1. Computers and mobiles offered something new, they opened up whole new opportunities and the ability to communicate as never before. AV's do not do that, they simply replicate (or attempt to) a very human activity and in doing so they take away from the sum of human experience. What are you going to do while being trundled about, play on your smartphone? You can do that anywhere, but one of life's experiences has been denied you by not driving, your world is closing in, not broadening out. The AV junkies will tell you they hate driving, fair enough, nobody is making them do it so why do they not organise their lives so as to minimise or eliminate the task altogether rather than foist their latest toys upon us?

2. Computers and mobiles do not, as a rule, have the potential to be primary causes of accidents, cars do. So just who is going to be responsible for them while they are on the road? The law of tort has been refined over the last two thousand years at least and now the AV companies think it can be changed overnight to suit their sales graphs. The lawyers have yet to dig their teeth into this aspect. To help avoid accidents there is much talk of connectivity, of cars talking to each other but that is mass surveillance by any measure. Will cyclists and pedestrians also be required to wear transponders or be chipped before going out? Society should not be required to change to suit AV's! And then there are the ethics to be programmed into an AV. AV's only have one method of accident prevention and that's to apply the brakes, how are they to be taught to swerve or choose how to minimise damage and injury. Who is going to get into a car that has been programmed to drive under a truck rather than hit a pedestrian in certain circumstances?

3. Mobile phones have come in for criticism for presenting a health hazard because they emit radio waves. AV's will not just emit radio waves but also lasers as well as filming their surroundings. What effect on human health will these emissions have, or what about the psychological impact of forever being filmed? Has any research been done on these aspects at all? We are entitled to our privacy, indeed, there are rules and regulations controlling the use of CCTV in the UK and Ireland and probably most other civilised countries as well, camera bedecked AV's attempt to drive a coach a horses through this legislation which was put in place to protect us.

4. Personal devices cost from a hundred to a few thousand, most are bought at the cheaper end. We have no idea what AV's are going to cost but I rather suspect they are not going to be cheap, not even in the long run, hence all the talk about car sharing etc, an idea that has been tried numerous times but simply hasn't gained acceptance. Ah but, AV's will be different we are told because they will be like taxis without the expense of a driver. Any taxi driver will tell you they earn peanuts as it is and just how much cheaper do AV taxis need to be than manned ones to get people to abandon their own private transport?

These are just a few points and there are plenty more to be chewed over some day but what is quite clear is that AV's are not going to happen anytime soon. Even Ford who are quite gung ho about them only hope to have a pilot scheme going by 2021 and that is under tightly controlled conditions and in a very well mapped area, and we still don't know how they are going to operate at night!

For what it's worth my advice would be to sell any shares you have in AV orientated companies.