I love being held to the standard that I must be the perfect cyclist but this shit slides….
Based on the article it’s an interim measure prior to a full regulatory framework set to come out in 2025 and will only cover assistive tech (e.g. Tesla autopilot) on motorways at slow speeds which strikes me as the simplest use case for it so it’ll be really interesting to see what the framework in 2025 looks like.
I have to say it’s quite nice to see us be ahead of the curve on at least one topic….
Why not wait until there are actual self driving cars to change the rules?
In theory this is a good thing. Self-driving cars have the potential to be much safer than humans, and motorway driving is generally the simplest driving we do (we’re going fast, but in a straight line with minimal complications like roundabouts to navigate). Self-driving cars are less likely to do stupid things like hog the middle lane, which would overall improve the efficiency of traffic.
Freeing up the legislative framework allows for more R&D. Technology usually moves at a faster rate than cultural changes, which moves faster than legislative/political ones. This seems to be a positive pre-empting of something that’s inevitably coming.
The thing that concerns me isn’t self-driving tech, but how that tech interacts with human operators in other vehicles. Cars could communicate with other self-driving cars, but they can’t with vehicles not equipped with that tech.
I really think we need physical infrastructure for self driving cars and regulated software, before we start trusting it too much
We’re going to end up looking like the people from Wall-E. Imagine being so brain dead you can’t take time away from your screens even during a drive.
This is fine because there’s no such thing as a self-driving car, and probably won’t be for 15+years.
Although I have no doubt that certain manufacturers will continue to claim their glorified cruise control constitutes “self-driving”.
great advertising, tailored to you and your location, can continue…..
It talked about some of the failures of the current technology that’s being tested out:
>A series of high-profile accidents involving fatalities both inside and outside driverless cars has shaken faith in the idea that they are safer overall… Perhaps the most unsettling incident came in March 2018 when a cyclist who was walking her bicycle across a street in Tempe, Arizona, died after an Uber vehicle testing on-road autonomy with a safety driver present hit her. A US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation concluded that the car detected something 5.6 seconds before the impact, but couldn’t identify it, and that the safety operator was looking away from the road for an extended period at the time.
However, also in the article:
>But blaming cars and their developers masks a more fundamental problem with [level-3 autonomy](https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/assets/cm/content/blog/sae-j3016-visual-chart_5.3.21.pdf). A study at the [University of Southampton, UK, in 2017](https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/01/driverless-cars.page) showed that people took an average of about 5 seconds to take control of an autonomous vehicle, with individual times ranging from 2 to nearly 26 seconds. A car at a speed of 100 kilometres an hour travels something like 140 metres in 5 seconds; even at a low speed of 30 kilometres an hour, a 5-second reaction time corresponds to more than 40 metres, and you have to add braking distance to that.
According to [this webpage](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car-dimensions), the average SUV length is 4.8m, so let’s say that two car lengths is 10m. If the Southampton study is correct, then at 30km/h (~20mph), if the average driver needs to brake to avoid collision, they would have crashed 4.2 seconds before they even made an attempt, so they’d still be going at 30km/h upon collision.
On surface level, given the figures I’ve been provided (and that I didn’t make any mistakes), I’m not sure if the legislation is a good idea, but then again, these figures tell me nothing about whether the participants would be able to walk away unscathed.
Mixed feelings about this.
Yes overall less accidents on roads, that’s good – but the risk here is actually incredibly minimal already, and could be minimised to near zero with crash structures and assistive technology. You’re also comparing those rates against the entire driving demographic which includes the bad drivers aswell as the good. Feels a bit like the bad drivers are being used as an excuse to reduce the freedoms of the rest of us. I enjoy driving and it’s a skill I’d rather refine and improve than lose.
I also have no real confidence that a supposed AI can handle a situation for which it doesn’t have reams and reams of real world data on which to make that judgement. Google should stick to getting my calendar management working properly, then it can shuttle me around in a two ton box at 70mph.
Once energy is cheap again and your driverless car can take a trip up the M42 by itself, suddenly you’ll have stacks of cars doing things like ferrying a book between Martha and her friend June. Don’t we have enough traffic on the roads?
I work as a Developer and tech is often looking for solutions to problems that don’t really exist. A £1 digital watch is better than an hand wound mechanical in practically every quantitative measure, so why are people still paying thousands for a Rolex?
The quicker we get to self driving cars the better, I do 40,000 miles a year and the amount of people looking at their phones while driving is shocking.
This gov is so desperate to chase clout and be seen as a world leader. Why not allow cooking in them as well?
Cars either need a human paying attention 100% of the time or 0% of the time, the idea that a human can simply take over when there’s an emergency is utterly reckless. Speak to any train driver, even though they’re not steering they need to be paying attention because a situation develops so quickly that if you were watching tv you could have killed 100 people before your brain even had time to comprehend what the alarm meant.
[deleted]
This seems like a good long term aim, but introducing it right now is beyond ridiculous.
There is little doubt that self driving cars will eventually be safer than human driven cars, and that using a self driving car will be similar to using a taxi – the occupants will have no responsibility for how it is driven. They will be able to watch TV, use their phones, and it won’t even matter if they have had a couple of drinks.
But we are not there yet. Once we get to the point where most cars on the road are self driving, and we have a good track record of them being extremely safe, then we can think about laws like this.
Fuck’s sake. This is a stupid idea and i can see people getting killed because of it. Sure, theself driving AI is good enough to drive a car but if something goes wrong and you’re watching TV, you’re fucked.
Fine.
But we still aren’t doing enough to mitigate for the further increase in car use with self driving cars. People won’t care much about sitting in a car for 1 hour in traffic of their own making if they can watch TV.
If there’s going to be even more cars on the roads, we need National segregated cycle infrastructure now. Not just for bicycles, but for e-scooters, wheelchairs, cargo-bikes, e-bikes, mobility scooters, even roller skates and long boards – otherwise we will become an even unhealthier, lazier, more congested country.
I don’t know. So you cannot use your phone but you can watch TV. Are driver less cars at this point yet where you can just watch tv and ignore what is going on around you.
I mean, I already semi-regularly see people watching TV whilst driving.
It’s annoying how long important road things take and even require lots of public consultations and stuff so it’s years before the change happens, and then suddenly out of nowhere something like watching movies in your car gets outlined in the law.
Like how extending the London pavement parking ban across the country was proposed years ago, the consultation into it was 2 years ago including which option people wanted, and then we’ve heard nothing about it since. We’ve not even got the results of the consultation. When an MP asked the transport sec whats happening with it all we got was “it’s a complex issue”. Like how is it a complex issue when 3 solutions were already outlined in the public consultation??
This is making me think of the scenes in arrested development when Gob says, “I’ve made a huge mistake”.
What’d be great is something like a self driving car, but way way bigger. Imagine something large enough to carry hundreds of people at a time. They could all relax and watch TV or enjoy the scenery as they travel across the country at great speeds!
We would probably need some kind of network of tracks for these great vehicles to travel across, but keeping them on their own tracks and away from pedestrians would keep everything safe.
Good news! Hat about playing candy crush, is that allowed?
There are two main boring sections when driving. The long motorway section of your journey and the stop start queue of congestion.
This is the automation most people need. Fully automatic cars in little bendy twisty British streets? Not in the lifetime of anyone reading this today.
Erm….wtf Boris? You still need to be paying attention to what’s going on, even in a self driving car. Even if it was 100% ready, there’s always that slight chance of the system missing a possible collision
The reason self-driving cars still can’t do it is because the feat they have to master is not driving a car, it’s understanding human beings.
It isn’t even close to being achieved.
*No self-driving cars are currently allowed on UK roads, but the first vehicles capable of driving themselves could be ready for use later this year, the Department for Transport (DfT) said.*
Hilarious.
Erm, hey how about we let self driving vehicles become wide spread before deciding that the driver shouldn’t have to pay attention?
Until someone complains about it, or someone is involved in an RTA
Who makes this shit up. Some moronic overpaid think tank full of kids with 180 IQ’s
Dumbest idea of the year so far
People are already addicted to technology and their phones, so yes let’s make it legal for them to watch the fucking TV while in their car.
Fucking hell just let look out at the window and scenery, leave the screens for an hour geez, we all know they’re going to be paid extras covered with advertising bullshit anyways
Does this mean you’ll now need to carry your telly license with you when out in the car?
Car insurance companies will be the strongest most vocal opponents. If the owner is so free from being in control of the car that they are legally allowed to watch TV then your insurance will have nothing to do with your personal status. Car insurers will be dealing with car manufacturers, who will be clued up and take no nonsense like individual insurance policies, so there’s going to be a lot of fat trimming with insurers coming soon.
I’m guessing using phones in the self-driving car will still be a crime?
Because that’s one idiosyncratic law if this is the case.
5 years ago we were 6m away from self driving cars. We’re still 6m away. But yeah, let’s argue about whether you can watch Netflix in one.
35 comments
I love being held to the standard that I must be the perfect cyclist but this shit slides….
Based on the article it’s an interim measure prior to a full regulatory framework set to come out in 2025 and will only cover assistive tech (e.g. Tesla autopilot) on motorways at slow speeds which strikes me as the simplest use case for it so it’ll be really interesting to see what the framework in 2025 looks like.
I have to say it’s quite nice to see us be ahead of the curve on at least one topic….
Why not wait until there are actual self driving cars to change the rules?
In theory this is a good thing. Self-driving cars have the potential to be much safer than humans, and motorway driving is generally the simplest driving we do (we’re going fast, but in a straight line with minimal complications like roundabouts to navigate). Self-driving cars are less likely to do stupid things like hog the middle lane, which would overall improve the efficiency of traffic.
Freeing up the legislative framework allows for more R&D. Technology usually moves at a faster rate than cultural changes, which moves faster than legislative/political ones. This seems to be a positive pre-empting of something that’s inevitably coming.
The thing that concerns me isn’t self-driving tech, but how that tech interacts with human operators in other vehicles. Cars could communicate with other self-driving cars, but they can’t with vehicles not equipped with that tech.
I really think we need physical infrastructure for self driving cars and regulated software, before we start trusting it too much
We’re going to end up looking like the people from Wall-E. Imagine being so brain dead you can’t take time away from your screens even during a drive.
This is fine because there’s no such thing as a self-driving car, and probably won’t be for 15+years.
Although I have no doubt that certain manufacturers will continue to claim their glorified cruise control constitutes “self-driving”.
great advertising, tailored to you and your location, can continue…..
I remember reading [this New Scientist article](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25133452-400-why-self-driving-cars-could-be-going-the-way-of-the-jetpack/) on how creating fully self-driving cars is more problematic than initially anticipated. (To be clear, they’re not saying it’s impossible; just that it might take longer than expected.)
It talked about some of the failures of the current technology that’s being tested out:
>A series of high-profile accidents involving fatalities both inside and outside driverless cars has shaken faith in the idea that they are safer overall… Perhaps the most unsettling incident came in March 2018 when a cyclist who was walking her bicycle across a street in Tempe, Arizona, died after an Uber vehicle testing on-road autonomy with a safety driver present hit her. A US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation concluded that the car detected something 5.6 seconds before the impact, but couldn’t identify it, and that the safety operator was looking away from the road for an extended period at the time.
However, also in the article:
>But blaming cars and their developers masks a more fundamental problem with [level-3 autonomy](https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/assets/cm/content/blog/sae-j3016-visual-chart_5.3.21.pdf). A study at the [University of Southampton, UK, in 2017](https://www.southampton.ac.uk/news/2017/01/driverless-cars.page) showed that people took an average of about 5 seconds to take control of an autonomous vehicle, with individual times ranging from 2 to nearly 26 seconds. A car at a speed of 100 kilometres an hour travels something like 140 metres in 5 seconds; even at a low speed of 30 kilometres an hour, a 5-second reaction time corresponds to more than 40 metres, and you have to add braking distance to that.
According to [this webpage](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/cheap-car-insurance/average-car-dimensions), the average SUV length is 4.8m, so let’s say that two car lengths is 10m. If the Southampton study is correct, then at 30km/h (~20mph), if the average driver needs to brake to avoid collision, they would have crashed 4.2 seconds before they even made an attempt, so they’d still be going at 30km/h upon collision.
On surface level, given the figures I’ve been provided (and that I didn’t make any mistakes), I’m not sure if the legislation is a good idea, but then again, these figures tell me nothing about whether the participants would be able to walk away unscathed.
Mixed feelings about this.
Yes overall less accidents on roads, that’s good – but the risk here is actually incredibly minimal already, and could be minimised to near zero with crash structures and assistive technology. You’re also comparing those rates against the entire driving demographic which includes the bad drivers aswell as the good. Feels a bit like the bad drivers are being used as an excuse to reduce the freedoms of the rest of us. I enjoy driving and it’s a skill I’d rather refine and improve than lose.
I also have no real confidence that a supposed AI can handle a situation for which it doesn’t have reams and reams of real world data on which to make that judgement. Google should stick to getting my calendar management working properly, then it can shuttle me around in a two ton box at 70mph.
Once energy is cheap again and your driverless car can take a trip up the M42 by itself, suddenly you’ll have stacks of cars doing things like ferrying a book between Martha and her friend June. Don’t we have enough traffic on the roads?
I work as a Developer and tech is often looking for solutions to problems that don’t really exist. A £1 digital watch is better than an hand wound mechanical in practically every quantitative measure, so why are people still paying thousands for a Rolex?
The quicker we get to self driving cars the better, I do 40,000 miles a year and the amount of people looking at their phones while driving is shocking.
This gov is so desperate to chase clout and be seen as a world leader. Why not allow cooking in them as well?
Cars either need a human paying attention 100% of the time or 0% of the time, the idea that a human can simply take over when there’s an emergency is utterly reckless. Speak to any train driver, even though they’re not steering they need to be paying attention because a situation develops so quickly that if you were watching tv you could have killed 100 people before your brain even had time to comprehend what the alarm meant.
[deleted]
This seems like a good long term aim, but introducing it right now is beyond ridiculous.
There is little doubt that self driving cars will eventually be safer than human driven cars, and that using a self driving car will be similar to using a taxi – the occupants will have no responsibility for how it is driven. They will be able to watch TV, use their phones, and it won’t even matter if they have had a couple of drinks.
But we are not there yet. Once we get to the point where most cars on the road are self driving, and we have a good track record of them being extremely safe, then we can think about laws like this.
Fuck’s sake. This is a stupid idea and i can see people getting killed because of it. Sure, theself driving AI is good enough to drive a car but if something goes wrong and you’re watching TV, you’re fucked.
Fine.
But we still aren’t doing enough to mitigate for the further increase in car use with self driving cars. People won’t care much about sitting in a car for 1 hour in traffic of their own making if they can watch TV.
If there’s going to be even more cars on the roads, we need National segregated cycle infrastructure now. Not just for bicycles, but for e-scooters, wheelchairs, cargo-bikes, e-bikes, mobility scooters, even roller skates and long boards – otherwise we will become an even unhealthier, lazier, more congested country.
I don’t know. So you cannot use your phone but you can watch TV. Are driver less cars at this point yet where you can just watch tv and ignore what is going on around you.
I mean, I already semi-regularly see people watching TV whilst driving.
It’s annoying how long important road things take and even require lots of public consultations and stuff so it’s years before the change happens, and then suddenly out of nowhere something like watching movies in your car gets outlined in the law.
Like how extending the London pavement parking ban across the country was proposed years ago, the consultation into it was 2 years ago including which option people wanted, and then we’ve heard nothing about it since. We’ve not even got the results of the consultation. When an MP asked the transport sec whats happening with it all we got was “it’s a complex issue”. Like how is it a complex issue when 3 solutions were already outlined in the public consultation??
This is making me think of the scenes in arrested development when Gob says, “I’ve made a huge mistake”.
What’d be great is something like a self driving car, but way way bigger. Imagine something large enough to carry hundreds of people at a time. They could all relax and watch TV or enjoy the scenery as they travel across the country at great speeds!
We would probably need some kind of network of tracks for these great vehicles to travel across, but keeping them on their own tracks and away from pedestrians would keep everything safe.
Good news! Hat about playing candy crush, is that allowed?
There are two main boring sections when driving. The long motorway section of your journey and the stop start queue of congestion.
This is the automation most people need. Fully automatic cars in little bendy twisty British streets? Not in the lifetime of anyone reading this today.
Erm….wtf Boris? You still need to be paying attention to what’s going on, even in a self driving car. Even if it was 100% ready, there’s always that slight chance of the system missing a possible collision
The reason self-driving cars still can’t do it is because the feat they have to master is not driving a car, it’s understanding human beings.
It isn’t even close to being achieved.
*No self-driving cars are currently allowed on UK roads, but the first vehicles capable of driving themselves could be ready for use later this year, the Department for Transport (DfT) said.*
Hilarious.
Erm, hey how about we let self driving vehicles become wide spread before deciding that the driver shouldn’t have to pay attention?
Until someone complains about it, or someone is involved in an RTA
Who makes this shit up. Some moronic overpaid think tank full of kids with 180 IQ’s
Dumbest idea of the year so far
People are already addicted to technology and their phones, so yes let’s make it legal for them to watch the fucking TV while in their car.
Fucking hell just let look out at the window and scenery, leave the screens for an hour geez, we all know they’re going to be paid extras covered with advertising bullshit anyways
Does this mean you’ll now need to carry your telly license with you when out in the car?
Car insurance companies will be the strongest most vocal opponents. If the owner is so free from being in control of the car that they are legally allowed to watch TV then your insurance will have nothing to do with your personal status. Car insurers will be dealing with car manufacturers, who will be clued up and take no nonsense like individual insurance policies, so there’s going to be a lot of fat trimming with insurers coming soon.
I’m guessing using phones in the self-driving car will still be a crime?
Because that’s one idiosyncratic law if this is the case.
5 years ago we were 6m away from self driving cars. We’re still 6m away. But yeah, let’s argue about whether you can watch Netflix in one.