Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Lord Borwick and Lord Lucas

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick]

The point is well made. It is an immensely complicated industry and, effectively, prohibiting adaptions would send it backwards.

On the issue of maintenance of these vehicles, there is a host of health and safety regulations which should cover many of the points raised. It is indeed extraordinarily dangerous to start dealing with high-voltage DC cables on the inside if you are not trained to do so. However, because of my interest in electrical vehicles in the past, I have gone through the training, the basic lesson of which is to stay as far away from it as you possibly can. It is extraordinarily dangerous, and I entirely support the training of people as proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, if we imagine a future with a lot of autonomous vehicles around, one of the things that such a vehicle needs to do is predict how other autonomous vehicles will react in particular circumstances—that is, if faced with a sudden unexpected obstacle, the priority will be to veer to the left, say. That knowledge can come only on the basis of a shared understanding of the software that each of them has and of the capabilities in terms of awareness of the local picture and the wider picture that are built into the vehicle. To allow those things to be tampered with by back-street garages and amateur electricians seems to me to go against the whole advantage of moving towards autonomy. Therefore I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, is aiming at. I think we need really clear control of the quality of maintenance.

I can see what the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, is aiming at in removing “or adapted”; we do not allow people to adapt Boeing 747s in a random sort of way. They might do it to trial things and have a bit of their own airspace to wander around in while they are doing it, but we should be really cautious in allowing widespread adaptation. Every adaptation introduces another complication that every other autonomous vehicle would have to be aware of. Adaptation should be confined to test areas and test tracks, and what appears on the public scene should be a well-understood, well-documented vehicle—and not too many different kinds, please.

Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Lord Borwick and Lord Lucas

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with my noble friend Lord Borwick that software updates should be the responsibility of the manufacturer. They are capable of updating it, and of making it automatic that it is updated. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, that systems need to be better than they are at the moment. I note that my iPhone issued by this House is automatically updated with software. About two weeks ago it deleted all my telephone contacts and it resists all efforts by all our excellent people in this House to restore it to normality, because Apple takes no responsibility for this, of course. It just produces the update and there is no recourse to make the thing work properly.

In the case of automated vehicles we absolutely need to have recourse to the manufacturers, and they need to know that that is where liability for these things rests. It is their responsibility to make sure that their fleet of vehicles on the roads is up to date and functioning as expected. This reflects back into other aspects of the Bill that we have already discussed, as to who should be allowed to make modifications and how the whole fleet of autonomous vehicles should communicate with each other.

I am also happy with Amendment 25; it is an excellent thing. I would only point out in the drafting of Amendment 28 that it refers to “public roads” whereas the Bill refers to “public spaces”. With reference to a conversation I had earlier with the noble Earl, Lord Lytton, that presumably includes the airspace above public spaces, so the Bill includes your future Amazon drone wandering along six feet above the pavement to drop your parcel over your gate. I see nothing in the Bill that excludes airborne vehicles—or indeed waterborne vehicles—so I presume that both are included in that definition of public spaces. I do not know which definition of public spaces is being referred to. The ones I can find in legislation are pretty vague and not really related to this subject, but I would assume that at the same time as thinking we are dealing with road vehicles, we are also dealing with ones that could be airborne—at least within reasonable reach of the ground.

[Lord Borwick]

My Lords, I think I rather agree with the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, about Amendment 28, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe, being better than my Amendment 23. It is better because the point about manufacturers going bust had not occurred to me—so putting it into the passive is a much better way of doing it.

Amendment 25 seems to be approaching a sort of strict liability basis, with the automated vehicle’s insurer responsible even if that vehicle was not responsible in any way for the accident. I refer him to the accident that was reported a couple of days ago with a Waymo vehicle in which another car went into it. It was absolutely not the fault of the automated vehicle; it was hit by a manually controlled car. In that case it would seem to be particularly unfair that the insurer of the automated car had to pay out and then recover from somebody else. That was an entirely innocent case where the automated vehicle was totally not responsible for the accident.

A lot of this will come out in due course as we learn more. It is a problem at this stage that we have to legislate to get the insurance right in an industry that is developing.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I beg to move Amendment 26, which has at its heart the flow of data between a driver and the insurer—but, more particularly, between an automated vehicle and the insurer. It suggests that the insurer should have the right to require data flows to be made in ways that are specified by them to support the contract for insurance. I am particularly thinking of data that might flow at the time of an accident so that the insurer can capture the full dataset at that point rather than risking it being destroyed, perhaps by a later fire or some other consequence of the accident. But we might also get a situation in which insurance flexes with the state and use of the vehicle. To go back to an aspect of my earlier Amendment 10, data flows are an important part of how we consider our relationship with automated vehicles.

[Lord Borwick]

My Lords, Amendment 27 is a probing amendment, triggered when I first read this Bill, which happened at about the same time as the very first fatal accident in America from a Tesla vehicle, when it was it was speculated in the press that Tesla would not release the data from the vehicle because it had proprietary value to Tesla. In fact, as I understand it, Tesla released the data in due course. However, I could imagine circumstances in which the owner or manufacturer of an automated vehicle believed that the less which was found out about this accident, the better for them.

One of the greatest advantages to the insurance industry of the automated vehicles is the enormous quantity of data that will be available from them. Not only will there be the product of six or more cameras facing every single direction but all the other information picked up about speeds can and will be stored in the vehicle as it goes by. Maybe the industry would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that to delete such data would be the offence of perverting the course of justice. However, in the meantime I wanted to propose the amendment.

Amendment 30, the next one in this group, is on the question of regulations, which has already been touched on in earlier debates about standards. However, I believe that the range of aspects of automated vehicles that we have discussed this evening is very great, and there is clearly a lack of knowledge on the part of noble Lords such as myself, not just about the sheer detail of this but about the industry and what is coming on. So many different things are happening, and each of them is an outstanding opportunity for the country. We need a legislative background that can cope with completely new circumstances, not only prohibiting things that are brand new and thoroughly bad but permitting things which are brand new and have not been invented yet.

On the suggestion that we can revert to new primary legislation, given the number of years it has taken to develop this legislation and the constant pressure on legislative time in both Houses, it would be wise for the Government to take regulatory powers to come up with new regulations to deal with new matters. Therefore, these limited new regulatory powers are proposed in Amendment 30.