AUGUST 28, 2018
Richard Young of Beca engineering group said transport experts had succumbed to “group think” and were ignoring ethical dilemmas over “robot” cars and whether people even wanted them.
Richard Young of Beca engineering group said transport experts had succumbed to “group think” and were ignoring ethical dilemmas over “robot” cars and whether people even wanted them.
“They’re blithely accepting we’re all going to have these autonomous electric vehicles in 10 years’ time, but I don’t see the evidence for it,” Mr Young said.
He will be a rare dissenting voice at the Intelligent Transport System Summit in Sydney, which starts today with 700 attendees hearing about the latest developments in automated vehicles, traffic infrastructure and mobility as a service.
Mr Young said the pursuit of autonomy was yielding benefits such as automatic emergency braking, which is already common, but the cost of achieving full autonomy would be harder to justify the closer it came.
Near-autonomous systems also had potentially fatal consequences, because humans could not be relied on to intervene as a last resort.
“The challenge with autonomous vehicles is they either have to be absolutely foolproof — that is, no steering wheel — or they’ve got to say, ‘this stuff is there to assist’,” Mr Young said.
Even with full autonomy, there were additional risks for the industry as the burden of liability shifted from drivers to carmakers.
Mr Young said the industry was “selling a dream” that dated back to the earliest autonomous vehicles in the late 1930s.
“Every time you see it, they’re always going to be on the road in 20 years,” he said.
Autonomous vehicles were pictured going hand-in-hand with electric vehicles and sharing because otherwise they would simply create more congestion.
But those technologies also faced hurdles, with the power system likely to struggle once EVs won 5-10 per cent of the market.
“Mobility as a service is not new,” he said. “Another app is not going to solve the problem.”
Despite this, carmakers were engaged in an expensive space race in the belief that “if they blink they will have to answer to shareholders or be history”.
Subscribe to our free mailing list and always be the first to receive the latest news and updates.