The driverless car is a dream that is probably as old as the invention of the back seat. Primitive versions of the concept are even older. According to tomorrowsworldtoday.com, Leonardo da Vinci (who else?) designed a spring-powered vehicle that moved by itself along a predetermined route.
A radio-controlled car was not driven by anybody in New York in 1925. A self-driving automobile, created under the auspices of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, was not driven by anybody from Pittsburgh to San Diego in 1995.
Stories about self-driving cars are everywhere; most come to the conclusion that people aren’t ready for them yet. Nearly half of Americans surveyed don’t feel safe in a driverless car. This suggests they are equally unlikely to be keen on crossing the road in a world where driverless cars are zipping hither and yon. There are obviously psychological barriers to be overcome.
As we have seen with AI, although everyone knows the future is coming, knowing what it will look like when it gets here is much more difficult. With driverless cars, prophecies range from a utopian, accident-free, non-polluting and cheap future to apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios in which the bad guys hack into all the driverless cars on the roads and take them over, locking their passengers in and doing ... bad stuff, man.
Over the past 20 years, public support for driverless cars has gradually but consistently gone down. Perhaps it’s analogous to the concerns people have around electric vehicles: what if it goes flat; what if I can’t find a charger; what if the battery wears out too quickly? All legit concerns.
But it’s nothing like what we would encounter if the internal combustion was being invented now and people had to be convinced that a great form of transport involved sitting on top of a shedload of inflammable liquid that would be exploded in order to move the thing forwards.
Humans being a cautious species, it takes only a few instances of trouble with driverless vehicles to outweigh all the equivalent but worse problems with human drivers: ineptitude, driving under the influence of alcohol and other drugs, use of cars as weapons, inconsistent attention, thoughtlessness and displays of bravado and machismo, all of which can kill people and are not to be found in the circuits of driverless cars.
So, to answer the question, dude, that’s where your driverless car is, so far. But it is coming, honestly. Too many billions have been invested in driverless cars for the advocates of automobile autonomy to walk – or at least be robotically driven – away.
Driverless cars are not a common sight in New Zealand, but there is provision for them. Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency even has guidelines if you would like to invent your own.
It includes definitions of the six levels of driverless cars that go up to level 5 because the first level is not level 1 but level 0. They are: 0 no automation (so you’d have to ask why are we including them?), 1 – driver assistance, 2 – partial, 3 – conditional, 4 – high and 5 – full. There are no level-4 or -5 cars in New Zealand, says Waka Kotahi.
Its guidelines are encouraging, even if they appear to be aimed at people who really need help following instructions: “Once you’ve decided to test vehicles in New Zealand, follow the Waka Kotahi process set out below to get your test vehicles on the road quickly and safely.”
This might encourage enthusiastic amateurs, but they are likely to be put off because, inevitably, Waka Kotahi just starts throwing paperwork at you: “Anyone wishing to test such vehicles needs to provide written evidence that the vehicles are compliant with New Zealand’s Land Transport Rules (external link). Written evidence must include a Statement of Compliance for Approved Vehicle Standards.”
That’s probably why you’re not seeing a lot of self-driving vehicles out and about on the mean streets of the Aro Valley.
One New Zealand company that seems to have moved past these impediments and got quite a long way down the road in driverless vehicles is Ohmio, founded in Auckland in 2017 and now operating internationally. It specialises in shuttle vehicles for the likes of airports and other contained environments. If anyone around here does know where your personal driverless car is, it’s probably them.
So far, however, it all sounds like a great argument for public transport, much of which already operates with a high level of automation, but usually with a human in there somewhere to take over when things go wrong.
