Letter to E&T - The IET Members' Magazine

An edited version of this letter appears in this month's E&T (Volume 13, Edition 1), distributed to 160,000 members of the IET - I'm leaving the unedited version here for interest and also since it seems to have had about a third removed prior to publication.

I'm fortunate to work with many companies developing autonomous vehicle technology and am pleased to offer my response to fellow members concerns on traffic jams and transport systems in the future. Many people have an image of autonomous vehicles as fairly dumb, like slot racing cars, or worse, human drivers. Perhaps 50 years ago (in fact TRL developed exactly this 'slot car' technology in 1967) that first would be accurate, but now development and testing of these technologies is far more advanced and perhaps for many, 'indistinguishable from magic'.

In the past two years, development by the research leaders, Waymo, has comfortably surpassed human performance, and a significant number of other players have armies of professionals numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands, working on these technologies. All dramatically increasing their investment in the field and including well-known automotive industry players such as Volvo and Jaguar Land Rover, as well as every other OEM that springs to mind, plus their many suppliers and even more organisations in the digital ecosystem of Silicon Valley. Many of these are rapidly catching up, matched by developments and innovations in transport management, intelligent mobility and the increasingly deployed aspects of ‘smart cities’.

There are many misunderstandings about how these autonomous machines work, what AI means in the context of decision making, how it is used, and how these machines interact with their environment, pedestrians and other road users of all kinds.

Autonomous vehicles will not arrive with a bang, they are not exciting (for users), they will not impose their will on others.. they will simply become part of our transport ecosystem just as hybrid or EVs have, and by the time they are a regular component of vehicles on the roads wherever you live (as the market leaders can already demonstrate in more than 25 cities in the US) the many topics of confusion and fear surrounding the funding, political will, technology uses, cybersecurity, transport network, car ownership and even job security will gradually dissipate. Many industries, such as those in high risk sectors such as space, marine, mining, or the military, already rely autonomous vehicles to do things that humans cannot or don't want to do, and as these have led the way to investment, so they have also led the way to understanding.

Lastly, while I do seek to temper fear and assuage doubt, I am also a pragmatist and suggest that it will still take another decade until we see autonomous vehicles in 'most towns and cities' and perhaps another three or four decades until all vehicles will be fully autonomous. To that end, I would hope even the most technophobic of us would be able to adapt, just as we have done so between first generation mobile telephony and the supercomputer in your pocket today over a comparable timeframe. In short, don’t fall for the hype!

These messages are why I helped create 'Self Driving Track Days', in particular to help engineers understand the technology, and also why I’ll be supporting The Confused.com London Motor Show with a new Autonomous Vehicle Zone in 2018, they’re also why I'm proud to be a member of the IET which provides us platforms to achieve the same.