Self-driving car confusion
The Motorcycle Action Group (MAG) is extremely concerned by a recent announcement that self-driving vehicles could be allowed on UK motorways as soon as next year. With EuroNCAP testing of how selfdriving vehicles respond, detect and react to motorcycles only scheduled to start in 2023, MAG is seeking evidence that motorcyclists will not be placed at risk.
Former Transport Secretary Grant Shapps had unveiled plans that would allow selfdriving vehicles to be used on UK roads by 2025. However, some pilot vehicles, including cars, coaches and lorries, with self-driving features could be operating on motorways within the next year.
MAG has long expressed concerns that detection systems do not adequately cope with motorcyclists. In 2016, research by RDW (the Netherlands Vehicle Authority) showed that cars with an innovative driving system, such as an adaptive cruise control, were capable of noticing motorcycles, but when motorcycles rode at the edge of their lane, the adaptive cruise control did not respond well to them.
In many tests, action had to be taken by the driver of the car to prevent a collision.
MAG chairman Neil Liversidge said: “It is a source of great concern that, once again, the interests of motorcyclists are an afterthought.
“Years of development of these systems have not taken sufficient care of motorcyclists’ interests. While the elimination of driver error may be a laudable goal, it is of no interest if that error is simply replaced by automatic incompetence. We will be holding the Government and authorities to account and demanding to see genuine evidence that these vehicles will not place riders at higher risk than human drivers do.
“Given that independent testing is yet to commence, I find it hard to understand how the minister can be so confident that the roll-out is sensible at this time.”
Another recent report by the Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation (CDEI, a government expert body), also warns that it might not be enough for self-driving cars to be safer than normal cars, concluding that the public may have little tolerance for driverless car crashes, even if they are safer on average. The CDEI report also states that if the public expects that selfdriving cars should be as safe as trains or aircraft it would require a 100-fold increase in average safety over manually driven cars.
Professor Jack Stilgoe, who advised the CDEI, added that there were also serious moral questions about how the testing of self-driving vehicles is conducted on public roads, as other road users could in effect become participants in these trials whether they liked it or not. “There is something quite important about the ethical principle of informed consent,” he said.
We may well be happy with our old two-strokes but the world is definitely changing around us.
For more information visit www.mag-uk.org