In the past for long periods of time life was fairly simple, you were born, lived in a local community, did the same thing most of your life, had a family and died, generally quite young.
Technology came along and changed all that. Today most people, at least in cities, live a much longer life and adapt with constant change to their work and private life as technological change accelerates .
This blog is an example of that. Twenty years ago who had heard of a blog? most people hadn't even heard of the Internet and streaming services were a pipe dream.
This blog is about autonomous vehicles and so far I have covered most of the basics about the subject so it becomes more difficult to write a decent length piece on a particular subject that can hold peoples interest.
I am now going to change the format of this blog so it will become more of a news update with the odd longer piece when I find something of interest that I consider worth expanding on.
So lets kick it off... Driverless cars are not the full story of automated vehicles.
In one of my first blogs I had a story about the EHANG 184 personal single seat autonomous quad copter.
At the time this was seen as a concept design that probably wouldn't go anywhere, but as I said earlier things today change quickly.
May 26th 2016 saw the signing of an historic agreement between the state of Nevada and the Chinese EHANG corporation. This agreement will provide the foundation for collaboration between the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS) and EHANG Inc in the areas of flight testing, training and development of autonomous aerial devices at Nevadas FAA test site.
The full story is here.
The blade runner future of flying cars may be replace by electric quad copters but the video below is eerily reminiscent of coming into Bangcock by bus with the huge electronic billboards on many of the buildings. I can just visualise it from a quad copter.
On a similar note, autonomous trucks are becoming more and more in the news recently with automated road trains being tested in real world conditions.
In April 6 conveys of trucks from different European countries converged at Rotterdam in Holland after driving in "platooning"mode from as far as Sweden and Southern Germany.
The Platooning method means that the lead truck, with a driver controls all the following trucks. this gives a consistent highway speed and better fuel utilisation. In this test all the trucks were semi autonomous and had drivers on board, but this gives a pretty good idea of what's to come.
Analysts are now saying that 21 Million self driving cars will be on the road by 2035. Many thousands will be on the road in the US by 2020 and that US will lead in this market.
These numbers have been upgraded seriously from the last report as the whole autonomous vehicle scenario is accelerating. As I said in a previous blog, the new space race is well and truly on and I don't think the news for the US in this is as rosy as the article indicates.
I think these estimates are still extremely conservative as China is pushing hard to get the lead in this market. Singapore is wanting thousands of automated taxis on the road in the next few years....
I personally don't think the US has a chance of beating Asia in a race like this, given their legal system and their peoples inert resistance and fear of anything promoted by the government.
If China wants to do it sooner, they will because they can, the US will have to convince their people to try it, the Chinese can just say you will do it.... end of story
In concluding for today I just want to put it out there that robots should look obviously like robots. It creeps me out when they look like people, have a look at these as an example and see if you agree with me.
Something a little different this time, mainly because the thought occurred to me that autonomous vehicles are just part of a whole raft of technology that is affecting the way we live.
So then I started to think about the long term affects that technological change will have on society.
I am no psychiatrist, sociologist or anyone else remotely qualified to comment on the actual effects but I over the years I have observed a trend.
People appear to becoming more socially isolated as technology gains ground in our everyday life.
Back in my younger days when dinosaurs ruled the earth the family would sit around the radio, and later the TV and watch or listen as a family.
For a real treat, occasionally you got to go to the movies and sit with a crowd to watch it together.
With the advent of affordable home computing, every kid has a mission control in their bedroom with a computer, tablet, mobile phone all working together over the internet.
Instead of sitting as a family, each member watches what they want on TV or streaming services or play games online, or frequently, both at the same time.
Even in the early days of computer games, my kids used to have LAN sessions where all their mates would come around, set up a local network and hook all their machines together, order pizza and away they go. Today it's all in the cloud so there is no direct personal interaction.
Many people go to work on public transport. With autonomous vehicles happening, the advent of a vehicle as a service is being mooted and may even become the new public transport of the future with trains and buses becoming obsolete. There you have people sitting, working or playing within the vehicle with no direct personal interaction. Is personal isolation the way of the future and social interaction done through virtual reality?
Another observation. You used to sit at your office desk and talk about things. Now it's all email or chat software. You can work all day and say nothing aloud to another person but have many virtual conversations.
Ok, so what has technology ever done for me?
Today its everywhere. Tonight I watched Britain's got talent the day after it's shown in the UK. One of the acts used computers to drive drones as part of the act and I watched it on the other side of the world several hours after it aired live.
People are printing prosthetic limbs on home computers for a fraction of the cost of commercial units.
One of my colleagues told me in the stairwell as I was leaving work today about a 3d printed electric bike. called light rider. Apologies to KIT (Knight Rider for those of you too young to know) for the pun. Even though it looks like something out of farscape, it is impressive as possibly the worlds first 3D printed motor cycle.
Computer controlled routers abound, I have one in my shed complete with computer keyboard, mouse and LCD screen and CAD CAM software.
What home doesn't have an LCD screen with a set top box and streaming services?
Foxconn, which is a major supplier of devices for Apple and other major suppliers has replaced 60,000 jobs with robots. A good choice for a manufacturer to reduce costs and increase productivity, but what is the long term cost to society?
Workers are also consumers. If workers are replaced by machines on a large scale then who is left to buy the products produced?
Some argue that they don't lose their jobs but just increase productivity, the world economic forum has an interesting paper here on the possible effects of automation
So when you are sitting in your autonomous car what will you be doing?
Going too or from work could be used to catch up on work, reading, studying etc but on weekends it could be another story.
With cars currently being only semi-autonomous, engaging in sex in a moving car brings more than the normal amount of risk to the act.
Latest news on the autonomous front: insurance companies are predicting a drop in the cost of insurance once this tech hits the road in serious numbers, with Bloomberg predicting insurance costs could drop 60% in 15 years, giving fears to the survival of the industry.
To compound their woes, vehicle manufacturers, confident in their products ability to avoid collision may choose to wear their own insurance costs, putting yet more pressure on the insurance industry.
Add to that the probability of less cars on the road due to a car as a service scenario and things start to look very bleak.
On that note, a new start up called Zoot, out of Silicon Valley, is attempting to raise $US252 Million to start an autonomous Uber type service. It also has a license to operate autonomous vehicles on the road in California. Uber, Lyft and others are heading down the same path and have inked deals with major vehicle manufacturers to provide these services.
Tesla, a name fast becoming synonymous with driver less technology, may be far closer to a fully automated vehicle than many people think, possibly next year if this article from MIT Technology Review has the facts right.
Tesla is fast becoming a leader as it is logging truly massive amounts of data as all their vehicles constantly send data back to Tesla. What that means in the real world, is that Tesla is getting the real world data equivalent of Googles total testing data, and this is hard to believe, every 10 hours.....
They have a massive, world wide test bed, on the road everyday,sending reams of data back to improve their systems based on real world data.
So the question is can we become socially isolated when we are connected like never before?
The new space race has begun, or more accurately the race to be the lead in driverless cars has begun.
The US and Russia began the space race when the US realised that Russia was so far ahead it would take a decade or more to catch up. In 1962 President Kennedy pushed through a program to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
By 1969 that goal was achieved
Today we have a new space race.
Countries all around the world are waking up to the fact that autonomous vehicles are no longer in the realms of science fiction but are a reality and ready to move out into the real world now.
Even the queen is talking about it
As a consequence many countries and manufacturers are waking up to the fact that they could be left behind and are suddenly making decisions about where they want to be in this emerging race.
As I have mentioned before, China is actively setting up vehicle to vehicle communication systems in existing vehicles to talk to autonomous cars. Baidu, Google of the orient, is heavily involved in this race as well and has signed an agreement with the City of Wuhu to build a dedicated zone for autonomous vehicles, the first in China.
Baidu is also partnering with BMW to build an autonomous car for the hugely lucrative Chinese market and is spending serious coin to get ahead of the game. As can be seen from the video below they are focusing on the technology and not worrying about the aesthetics yet but that will change...
Meanwhile, in Europe, VW Group’s head of digitisation Johann Jungwirth is talking up driverless cars happening quicker than most people believe “In a few years we’ll see vehicles without a steering wheel or pedals. This is not 2030. I’m talking about five years from now.
By 2025 it will be commonplace.” He then went on to say "We will be making a massive effort to promote piloted driving. We will be investing with the aim of bringing these technologies to market faster than the competition"
So yet another joins the race.
Several German auto makers held their shareholder meetings recently and all are discussing Teslas' lead in both electric and autonomous technology and their reaction to it.
BMW announced " In 2018, we will lunch a BMW i8 Roadster. This will be followed in 2021 by the BMW i Next, our new innovation driver, with autonomous driving, digital connectivity, intelligent lightweight design, a totally new interior and ultimately bringing the next generation of electro-mobility to the road."
Challenge accepted, race on.
Raj Nair, Ford Motor Co's head of design,engineering, research and product development believes that "it is credible that and autonomous vehicle at SA Level 4 [one step below full automation] will hit the market by 2020".
Toyota announced its financial results this month an also signaled a paradigm shift in thinking. After a mostly lukewarm approach to autonomous vehicles in the past it has now well and truly joined the race by announcing the Toyota research lab and that "Automated driving and robotics are challenges that affect us closely" Toyota last year put up a billion $US to expand its research into autonomous driving and has announced a collaboration with the University of Michigan, the third alliance with universities in the US to advance its autonomous driving efforts.
On your marks.
Volvo is to run self driving versions of family 4x4s on London roads next year as the motor industry trial of autonomous vehicles accelerates.
Volvos test is called Drive Me London and will see families driving autonomous vehicle on public roads as they have been doing in Gothenberg since 2014.
Get set.
Automated vehicles is not just about cars. Look how many trucks are on the road at any time around the world delivering everything we use on a daily basis from basic food to building materials and everything in between.
A new US startup called Otto Trucks is converting, for around $30K, any standard truck built since 2013 into an automated workhorse.These are now on the road in limited testing in states that allow it and will be a growth industry once trucking companies start to look at the costs involved with manually driven trucks involved in collisions through damage, loss of earnings and legal ability.
However, given unionisation and US laws this may well be something that develops faster in Asia due to social differences.
GO......
The development and implementation of this technology is most definitely accelerating, pardon the pun.
A lot of it is due to visibility.
Let me expand on that.
Remember when you wanted to buy a car? If you aren't fixated on a particular brand then you do research and eventually come up with a make and model that you are interested in.You start looking at them, test drive and so on.
At this point something strange happens, because everywhere you look now you see that model on the road, they are prolific and seem to be breeding at an exponential rate. You never realised how many there are out there.
What has happened here is focus.
You have become aware.
The same thing applies to autonomous vehicles.
I have been in a new job now for just over six months at the time of writing, and as you would expect,I am fairly passionate on the subject of autonomous vehicles and can't resist the impulse to start discussions on it at work......frequently.
The same situation has happened with my colleagues, everywhere they look now they see news on autonomous vehicles. They hate me for it but hey, it happens.
So as more and more governments and companies become aware they start to think about the dollars and social benefits and talk about it and more news stories appear. The more the people see the more they think about it and the more focused they become.
The manufacturers and governments see the progress of other manufacturers and governments and want a piece of the action but to do that they need to get there first so they need more partnerships and alliances which generate more news stories and more awareness.
Rinse repeat.
So yes, the new space race is most definitely on - but this time it's not about outer space, its about evolution.
If you have been here before you will be well aware that I am a great believer in Autonomous vehicles, no suprises there.
But today I was suprised at the level of automation that already exists in our society. Honestly, I really need to get out more.
Today I took my daughter and her family to the airport and then I really started to think about how far down the track automation has already taken us and how we accept it without a second thought.
Automated traffic lights linked by computer to maximise traffic flow all the way. When we arrived at the airport there are automated signs with flashing messages and electronic advertising panels trying (unsuccessfully I might add) to sell me stuff.
We drive in to the fully automated car park where we take a ticket and the gate opens, we drive in and park and after getting the cases and all the other stuff needed to support a four year old on a trip, we entered the terminal.
Do we wait in a long line for a bored person behind the desk to print out boarding passes and give seat allocations?
Not these techno bunnies.
They've already done most of that online and have seat allocations, boarding pass and all other info on their smartphones.
At the airport the cases get weighed on an automated scale, the phone boarding pass is scanned and the baggage labels shoot out of the machine. You attach those to the bag and trundle across the floor to the baggage check in machine.
This machine scans the phone again, you place the bag on the rack and lasers scan the area and read the tags. The machine says thank you and the bag automatically disappears into the bowels of the earth, hopefully to reappear again in one piece at the final destination.
Now that process is out of the way without any airport staff intervention everyone sits down and uses their phones for what they're designed for, letting all their friends know they're at the airport through their favourite social media platform.
At that moment my wife gets a selfie from the four year old who has just discovered how snap chat works.
We are sitting there gazing out the window at the plane when a food handling platform rolls up. It has a shrink wrapped container of food trays about a metre square. It slides from the truck to the conveyor by rollers, no human interaction. The conveyor then rises on a scissor lift to the galley level of the aircraft. The roller start to move it toward the aircraft and the rollers change direction and the container rotates to face the aircraft and then moves in automatically, no people to be seen. The truck backs away and the door closes.
The boarding announcement comes and everyone gets to stand in line, where they stay for the next 15 minutes as the staff try furiously to get the boarding pass scanning system to work. After numerous reboots the computer God gives a final sad laugh and deigns to let people aboard the highly computerised and automated aircraft.
We say our goodbyes and walk back to the car to pay the parking robot $13 for the pleasure of leaving our car in the open wet car park for less than two hours.
I then have to manually drive my non automated car home.
In the last few blogs I have been looking at how things are shaping up in the world for the implementation of this exciting new technology.
What has become obvious is a lack of coordination and cooperation. There doesn't seem to be a concerted effort to make this happen. Governments are doing things on a state by state basis and while a lot of talk is going around about national standards in many countries this does seem to be a long way off . Manufacturers are working on systems independently of each other, as would be expected in the early days of development but standardisation of technology allows economy of scale in manufacturing - required for a wholesale roll out of this across entire countries.
There are many other issues as I discussed last week holding back the technology - at least in the west.
I have written a few times about what is happening in China, and the more I look the more I see things accelerating.
One of the key things in making driver less cars available is the human attitude. In China a recent survey found 75% of people would like to drive in an autonomous car but in the US it's a different story with 75% of people fearing autonomous cars.
China has a lot of reasons to want this technology to work and is using the opportunity to couple this with the development of electric vehicles.
Given that china has massive pollution and congestion problems and estimated road deaths of 200,000 a year, they have a very strong incentive to make this work, and more importantly, because of the political structure they have the ability to make this happen.
More importantly, from a world perspective, they have the ability to make this happen very quickly.
The west is agonising over testing and many experts say that the testing phase will last for many years and untold millions of kilometres before governments allow it legally on the road.
However there is nothing like the real world to put things in perspective.
This is illustrated by an interesting article from the New Yorker which talks about Tesla gathering masses of data from their users driving on autopilot.
This data collected from Tesla in a single day is equivalent to the total mileage gathered by Google cars over the entire testing life - every single day.
Just to be clear, Tesla cars are logging over million miles a day in autonomous mode and that is providing free real world data back to Tesla.
Now, imagine the data that can be collected from fleets of cars on the road in China.
China has already come up with a draft road map for the next 3-5 years to have self driving cars on the road and Li Keqiang, automotive Engineering Professor at Tsinghua University is leading the committee.
The draft will define standards including a common language for vehicle to vehicle and infrastructure to vehicle communication.
This committee has the backing of the powerful government Ministry of Industry and Information Technology which give legitimacy to the proposed standards and a fast track to making it happen.
China also has a raft of new car makers springing up including Future Mobility Corporation Limited.
For a new company it has made large first steps by hiring top BMW designers to work on their cars.
There is a push happening and this article by the Chairman of Zhejiang Geeley shows the reasoning behind the push and how seriously it is being taken. From a financial perspective it makes great sense as well and the Boston Consulting group says "China will be the largest self driving market by 2035 taking up to 30% of sales that year."
China leading the push - is that a bad thing for the rest of the world?
Yes and (maybe) No.
If China has a large scale roll out of this technology in the next few years, which is entirely likely, then the standards implemented, refinements made from lessons learnt and the sheer prestige of having these fleets in operation gives them a huge edge in marketing to the rest of the world.
Not to mention the amount saved by using home grown technology rather than importing it.
Good news for China, not so much for the likes of Ford and GM who are struggling to get their test cars on the road due to the lack of standards, laws and legal liability.
On the flip side, there will be a huge amount of technology and data coming out of China which could be utilised to the wests advantage to leverage their own testing and development.
This is if the boom doesn't create a brain drain to Asia and leave the west trying to play catch up.
What this could be is a major shift in technology from the west to the east which from our perspective may not be entirely desirable.
This is a simple statement but think of the ramifications.
A city state running automated taxis within a year! Johny cab is here....
In a state where owning a car starts at more than $200,000, then a car as a service makes a whole lot of sense. When you consider that they could have 300,000 auto cabs on the road to cater for the population and not wait more than 15 minutes for a ride then it does indeed make a lot of sense.
Last week I ended with the statement Automated vehicles - Who's driving?
Now it may make more sense to say "China - virtually in the drivers seat"
It will be very interesting to see what comes up at the Beijing motor show that opened this week (2016).
As anyone who has read any of my previous blogs will recognise, I am quite passionate about autonomous cars.
For the sake of argument this time I am going to play the devils advocate and see what will be the obstacles and what could slow the implementation of this technology.
Firstly a couple of notes.
As most people these days accept, autonomous vehicles will happen.
China for example has massive transport issues and sees this as a way out, probably also giving them more control over the populace at the same time but that is another issue. They will pursue this much faster than the west will because they can do so far easier and the west will be watching and learning from their problems.
More than 90% of vehicle incidents causing death or injury are caused by the driver.
Ok so what could go wrong?
The major issue will be people. Many people inherently distrust technology and a very real human trait is to resist change. Fear of the unknown means that education has to be the key if government wants to implement this technology and by building up the main advantages (saving lives) and guaranteeing the reliability of the software would go a long way to addressing this. People need to feel comfortable that they can watch a movie, read a book or work in the car, secure in the knowledge that they are not going to end up as an impromptu barbecue on the side of the road.
Once this tech hits the road we have to do everything in our power to ensure that the technology is so good that the road toll reduces significantly before there is a death that can be attributed to an automated vehicle because if that happens early it will be used to discredit the whole concept.
Undoubtedly deaths will occur, no system is perfect, and of course no road death is acceptable. When the road toll is reduced by a very significant amount we can learn from those unforeseen incidents that do occur. The great advantage is that we will be able to do something about it easier than we can now as the data from incidents can be analysed in depth. Each and every death or injury will mean that others won't suffer the same fate as we find out why and stop it happening again.
Liability. Some governments are tackling this now, the UK is putting frameworks in place and talking options on insurance and liability already so they will have that in place before there is an explosion in affordable technology in this field over the next few years and people startg to seriously use it.
The US appears still to be on a state by state basis with conflicting laws being formulated. Obamas' new 4 billion dollar initiative hopefully will coordinate state and federal efforts to accelerate the technology. If successful there will be a federal overview which could allow national standards and all states and the federal government hopefully would be on the same page.
Here in Australia there appear to be very little happening at all. South Australia seems to be the only state looking at this seriously and is changing the law to allow testing on the road and are discussing liability. I don't want to keep flogging a dead horse but Australia really needs to have a coordinated approach or we could seriously lag behind the rest of the world - and South Australia...(WA humour).
Ethics, I personally don't see this as an issue due to the nature of the technology but there are many articles that discuss this in depth. The theory is interesting but if viewed in a real world and compared to the current reactions of drivers in dangerous split second decision scenarios, I for one, would be far happier for a vehicle to react for me. Given my reaction times and speed of thought, everyone would have a better chance of survival.
Cost. The cost of the technology may be a deciding factor in the initial uptake of the technology but it will drop as volume increases and it becomes more widespread as economy of scale kicks in. One of the major contributors to that will be the "Taxi" industry, if you can call it that, where Uber, Lyft and a raft of others will be early adopters and pour billions into having this available so they can get a lead on everyone else.
What they would like to see, and I believe is a reasonable assumption, that private ownership of vehicles will decrease as the "car as a service" becomes very affordable.
Government action. I feel this to beTHE KEY and alluded to it earlier because if government is not ready for this technology to be used when it becomes available then there will a swath of differing technologies being used on the road by early adopters regardless of the law.
A framework must be developed at a federal level to standardise the technology and laws across the nation.
Lawyers. See above. If the law is not clear and unambiguous then it becomes open to legal interpretation and lawyers will have a field day. This in itself could become a huge impediment to a faster uptake and development of the technology. If car makers are reluctant don't have the protection of law and they find themselves being sued if their product is misused then they could be very reluctant to bring their products to market without a lot of locks and controls.
Software testing and control. I addressed this in my previous blog regarding hacking and it is a serious concern.
Improved sensors. The current technology appears to have reached the point of being practical and usable but needs to be extended for distance and weather conditions as they can become inaccurate and obscured by rain, snow and fog.
However this shortcoming can be overcome to a large extent by detailed GPS based mapping so that if the sensor lose real time visibility it could slow the vehicle and continue to run by utilising GPS coordinates and comparison to the stored visual data. This detailed mapping is being done now by the likes of Google.
Vehicle to vehicle and infrastructure communication. To allow a vehicle to know what is happening and to share information about road conditions, weather, roadworks or collisions and natural disasters it is essential to have real time communications between vehicles and infrastructure. This allows the cars to tell each other not only about conditions but also about what actions they intend to take in a given situation, ie emergency braking or avoidance. This needs to be standardised and implemented, but again, government has to have a major role in ensuring this works for interoperability between manufacturers.
A case could be made to fit ALL existing vehicles with this so autonomous cars know what manual vehicles are doing as well as alerting their drivers to dangerous conditions that other vehicles have reported. China is currently rolling out this before the autonomous cars hit the road in a proactive move, but again there could be other considerations to that in a totalitarian state.
Strangely enough, each time I look at the progress of automated vehicles I keep coming back to the same point.
We can't leave the development of such an important and social changing technology to the manufacturers alone.
Governments need to be involved NOW before its too late, at least in a standards framework design by manufactures and other stakeholders to come up with something everyone can live with (literally).
Autonomous vehicles in the new world - Who is driving? seems to be an appropriate sentiment.
Autonomous vehicles, they are coming, no question, no way to get the genie back in the bottle, autonomous vehicles will be a part of everyday life. Without doubt they will have a huge impact on life, transport, and anything else you can think of but there is also a very great potential for a very dark side.
Anyone who has had an even passing use of a computer at home or at work knows about the minefield individuals and companies need to go through every single day to keep them secure, virus free and usable.
When a hacker gets into your computer it can have a devastating effect on your life ranging from stealing your bank accounts right up to pretty much stealing your entire life with identity theft.
Now consider that every function of an autonomous car is controlled by one or more computers. It's not such a big step to imagine what would happen if a freeway full of autonomous cars travelling at high speed suddenly got hacked? Identity theft would look pretty good in comparison to the widespread death and destruction that could be the result of a state sponsored attack on the road system of another country.
I don't for a minute doubt that this will be addressed before a widespread release of this technology happens, but as history shows us, we don't know what we don't know.
For example if you own a Jeep Cherokee there is a chance that someone could have taken control of your car and crashed it for you.
Wired magazine has very good story here about two researchers who did just that. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have found (and exploited) a weakness in Chryslers' systems that allowed remote access once they have the IP address of a computer installed in these cars called Uconnect.
Once they had that they could download code that effectively gave them control of everything electronic within the vehicle..... including the steering and brakes.
To be fair this never made it into the wild as Chrysler issued a fix extremely quickly.
But as I said, we don't know what we don't know so the possibility of someone with evil intent finding a flaw like this and exploiting it for nefarious purposes is a very real possibility.
To me, this is another reason that governments need to be proactive in this technology, not by controlling it but setting the laws and standards of testing to ensure that issues such as this can be mitigated.
Not that industry would deliberately falsify or compromise safety standards or emission controls would they? OK Volkswagen springs to mind with diesels, oh, and with cars stopping for no reason, and yea, Toyota cars failing to stop and... you get the idea. Admittedly the Volkswagen and Toyota problems with stopping and failing to stop respectively appear more to do with software testing than malevolence but just goes to prove the point that we don't know what we don't know. The manufacturers thought that the software that controlled these functions worked just fine but they didn't know that certain circumstances could create problems.
I don't claim to know the inner workings of car design but it needs oversight in the form of regulation to ensure that testing is rigorous and effective and as the car assumes more and more of the driving functionality it becomes more and more critical that the software is up to the job.
Another software control that needs to be built in and I know that some cars already have this, is multiple computers that cross check each other, so if there is a failure, the cars knows it's ill and can safely move off the road while refusing to go back into autonomous mode.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that!
All of the onus isn't on the car manufacturers either. As this technology becomes more pervasive the road system will need to become smart as well. No longer will it be enough to have speed limit signs and road work signs. Some cars, such as Mercedes can read these but it would be far better to make the road system more intelligent and proactive. That way the car can know road conditions and delays before it gets there and if there is a more efficient route, change its course. Road works with temporary lane markings and speed limits can be transmitted electronically (and enforced).
The software that controls that will need to be vigorously tested and secured as well, as there are public safety implications to be protected.
I never thought that I would be an advocate for government to be involved in private industry decisions and I still don't but I do believe there needs to be a government framework around all of this to ensure that public safety comes before the corporate need.
Corporations are there to make profits for their shareholders and sometimes the corporation comes before the welfare of the people.
For any large organisation, be it government or corporate, there has to be a system of checks and balances for the greater good.
I keep saying, and will keep saying that government needs to be involve now, before the car makers set the standards and build a power base that can't be reversed.
The time to do this is now, before it becomes mainstream, by then it may be too late and any changes or legislation once there is a large user base will only serve to delay the implementation of this technology, not assist in its uptake.
