REVENGE OF THE ROBOCARS!
It’s 2026. An armed gang jumps in front of your driverless car. It automatically stops... and you’re a sitting duck. Dystopian fiction? No, it’s an all-too-real official study into what might be called ...
IT IS the year 2026. Driverless cars have taken over Britain’s roads, sold on the promise they will make travel safer and more enjoyable. But cunning criminals have worked out how to exploit the vehicles’ hightech security systems – if they throw something at them, the machines will instantly come to a halt in order to avoid injury or damage.
Gangs of armed youths roam wealthy areas of the UK, forcing the autonomous cars to stop, smashing their windows then robbing their helpless occupants of jewellery and money.
This nightmare scenario may sound like something out of a dystopian science-fiction novel, but it is actually a prediction made in Governmentcommissioned research about the imminent arrival of driverless vehicles on our streets.
And when the academics imagined who would campaign for justice for victims of ‘automated muggings’ a decade from now, they chose The Mail on Sunday.
Their study paints a disturbing picture of the future of transport in which cars driven by computers get in the way of ambulances, are hacked to give away celebrities’ whereabouts and even decide whether it is better to run over a child or a pensioner.
It is a very different vision from that of Ministers, who want to put Britain at the forefront of the coming revolution in motoring in the hope it will generate as much as £51billion for the UK economy, save 2,500 lives and create 320,000 jobs by 2030.
Last year’s Autumn Statement pledged £100million for new ‘testing infrastructure’ and a Modern Transport Bill will be published soon to change insurance law so that users of driverless cars are covered as well as their vehicles.
Four trials of the vehicles are already under way, in Greenwich, Bristol, Coventry and Milton Keynes, while ‘platoons’ of driverless trucks connected by computers are earmarked for pilot studies on the M6 in Cumbria.
Transport Minister John Hayes told a House of Lords committee last year that driverless cars ‘could make driving safer’ because ‘human error is the principal cause of most road traffic accidents’. He also said the technology ‘might be beneficial in respect of accessibility’ because it would allow the elderly and disabled to get around more easily. And it might lead to less congestion on the roads and fewer harmful emissions because ‘people will acquire a car when they need it, rather like they might book a taxi now when they need it’ rather than everyone having to own one.
Engineers have devised a scale of six levels of vehicle automation, from zero where the driver is in complete control, to five where computers are in charge of everything and occupants never take the wheel.
Although some ‘level four’ cars have been tested at slow speeds on UK roads, experts say level five is many years off because manufacturers are still trying to perfect the sensors and cameras needed to make sure drivers are never required to intervene.
US firm Tesla is one of the pioneers of automated vehicles, but the technology is still far from perfect. Last week it emerged that Tesla test vehicles had travelled 550 miles on public roads in California during two months in the autumn, but had still recorded 182 ‘disengagements’ where the driver was handed back control.
Tesla do already sell semi-automated vehicles and in May, a man driving one on ‘autopilot’, an option on the car that allows it to take control of speed and steering on major roads, was killed when the car’s sensors failed to spot a white lorry against a bright sky.
Such is concern about the cars’ safety that the UK Government has already rowed back on proposals to scrap the Highway Code rule that insists on a two-second gap between cars and a law that bars drivers from watching TV at the wheel.
The Department for Transport is also aware that the public will have to be convinced that it is safe to let
Gangs halt cars, smash windows and attack drivers
computers take control of the steering wheel and brakes of a speeding car, and so commissioned experts at University College London’s Transport Institute to ‘identify the key social and behavioural questions that should be addressed relating to automated vehicles’.
This included drawing up a ‘number of plausible scenarios of future technologies and usage patterns… representing a possible future where the introduction and/or adoption of AVs [autonomous vehicles] had led to unexpected and, in some cases, controversial events’.
These scenarios were the subject of two day-long events in Whitehall last May with councils, road-safety groups, lawyers and academics.
One of the 12 scenarios was described in a mocked-up article from a transport magazine dated February 2026 and headlined ‘Automated mugging’. It imagined MPs had launched an inquiry into ‘the vulnerability of occupants of fully autonomous vehicles following a series of high-profile vehicle-jackings and personal muggings in wealthy, lowdensity areas at night – throwing into question the whole idea of “hands-free” driving’.
The future article stated: ‘AVs travelling down residential streets have been suddenly surrounded by groups of young men, wielding bars and bats. The vehicles halt, to avoid causing injury, and then remain immobile while windows are smashed and occupants are threatened. Having suffered the fear and humiliation of the attack, the occupants are further angered by the vehicle’s monitoring systems identifying damage and thereby refusing to restart so they can resume their journey.’
It added that ‘The Mail on Sunday has added its weight to the campaign for action’, and described how this newspaper had told the story of a victim of the new type of crime.
‘Sue Brown was returning home from a night out with friends and while her vehicle was passing a local park something was thrown in front of her car, which made an emergency stop.
‘Immediately she was surrounded by four youths; one smashed a side window and demanded her necklace, watch and purse. “What could I do?” she recalls. “If I’d had my old manual car I’d have driven at them and they would have soon scattered! We bought this car as we were told it was a lot safer… we traded it in the next day for a ‘proper’ car.”’
Participants in the Whitehall event were asked if this would be a serious enough problem to halt the progress of driverless cars, and if it made sense to allow technology where ‘the occupant has no control over the actions – or inactions – of the vehicle’.
The research also imagined that driverless cars could hinder the progress of emergency service vehicles, leading to unnecessary deaths, because some would pull over to the left of the road and others to the right.
And it invented a social-media post by a woman whose car – called a Wu Ming X36 and boasting SitBack technology – had suffered a ‘complete systems failure’ while she was in the Highlands and left her stranded as it had no manual override or even a steering wheel. One scenario, written in the style of a newspaper column, imagined how ‘the world’s most renowned moral philosophers’ had developed a ‘behavioural algorithm’ to decide how autonomous vehicles would deal with ethical dilemmas.
But it led to a professor’s Oxford home being firebombed because of the decision the software made in one crash. The article imagined that the car had chosen to spare the life of ‘a four-year-old boy with a degenerative disease likely to mean he would die before the age of ten’, but leading to the death of ‘a 78-year-old with 13 grandchildren’.
Those taking part in the research last year were asked if we can ‘ever get used to the notion of setting rules that place higher value on some lives than others’, and whether it would make a difference if ‘we expect many fewer people would be dying than is currently the case without autonomous vehicles’.
Another scenario imagined that children would take to playing ‘chicken’ with the ‘Robodrivers’ by stepping in front of them to see if they stopped in time.
More prosaically, the UCL report also invented a scenario in which a section of the A3 near Guildford was converted to ‘exclusive use of AVs’, with 6ft-high railings so that the vehicles could safely travel at speeds of 180kph (111mph)
One section highlighted the risk posed by hackers, imagining they might upload to the internet ‘data giving the location of [fictional] reality TV star Emma Dale’s vehicle’, suggesting she was on her way to the home of a man with whom she was rumoured to be having a love affair.
Other scenarios suggested there might be outrage if breweries gave free lifts home in driverless cars to anyone who spent £30 in their pubs, or if the Government subsidised trips for the elderly.
A more positive article highlighted the possibility that commuters would ‘gain an hour a day’ as they could use their journeys to work or play computer games with their children instead of having to concentrate on the road ahead.
Participants in the Governmentcommissioned workshops were asked: ‘How far away in technological terms do you think we are from a scene like this occurring in practice?’
Having been confronted with these images of a dark future, they could be forgiven for hoping it is still many decades off.
Cars decide if it’s better to kill children or pensioners