New Driverless Cars

Published Date: 21st Jul 2016

 

After several accidents involving driverless vehicles in the last year, it seems Germany is leading the way in calling for black box data recorders to be fitted to vehicles. Many of the German car manufacturers such as Volkswagen Audi group, BMW and Mercedes could all be made to include an aircraft style black box data recorder in their autonomous vehicles.

The idea is that when a vehicle is in driverless or autonomous mode the black box data recorder will collect all the data such as speed, GPS location etc. so in the event of an accident it would be easier to determine if the autonomous system has played any part in incident.

As the German car makers play such a large role in the worldwide car market it would be likely the UK would accept black box data recorders and they would become an everyday component in all new vehicles.

It is also worth pointing out that driverless cars have already travelled millions of miles on the road for Google & Tesla and they are deemed statistically much safer than human driven vehicles. It is essential real world experimentation continues for driverless vehicles so the artificial intelligence software becomes more experienced and reliable before vehicles are released to the open market.

The innovation of autonomous/driverless vehicles will not evolve and grow without some accidents and issues but it is how the systems learn and improve from these incidents which should determine just how soon we will be able to buy a Driverless car for the uk road.