Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill (First sitting)

Iain Stewart Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 31st October 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Karl Turner]

Q What would happen with an uninsured vehicle, then? At the moment, the Motor Insurers Bureau compensation scheme kicks in. Would that apply to automated vehicles? If not, should that be stated in the Bill?

Ben Howarth: We think it definitely should apply. I know that there have been discussions between the MIB and Department officials about the correct way to do that, and it will be interesting to see how the Committee approaches it. My understanding is that the reason for not having the MIB scheme in the Bill is that it is not in the Road Traffic Act 1988 either, so the existing system is not directly in primary legislation. I think the MIB will be assured so long as the Government confirm that it is still the ultimate fund of last resort, which it definitely should be. It does not necessarily need to be in the Bill, but we would like absolute clarity on how it will work.

[Iain Stewart (Milton Keynes South) (Con)]

Q I would like to follow up on Mr Turner’s point about clause 4 and the respective obligations of the manufacturer and the driver to update software. Clause 4(1)(b) refers to

“updates that the insured person knows, or ought reasonably to know, are safety-critical.”

That strikes me as very woolly. I would be grateful for your opinion on where the balance should lie. I accept that if someone has wilfully not installed updates or overwritten them, or something, they become liable. However, if the manufacturer has sent through an update, but the person has not taken it to the garage or downloaded the software—or whatever—at what point do they become liable? I have an update waiting for my iPhone, but I have not got round to doing it. That is not safety-critical, but is there a parallel? Do we need a tighter definition than “ought reasonably to know”?

David Williams: It is interesting that you mention the iPhone, because that is exactly the debate that we had in our early discussions. Currently, for most things you buy, you have the right to refuse a software update. You are allowed not to get round to doing your iPhone update; you can continue to bypass it. Our view was that when we are talking about a tonne of metal travelling at high speed on the road, people should lose that right, because it would enable them to take risks with other people’s lives. We think the updates should be implemented straight away, because we see them as being improvements. As for whether they are safety-critical or not, it would be a damn sight easier if all updates had to be implemented immediately and the responsibility fell on the manufacturer, but then you are drifting into trying to impose something in UK legislation that some European territories and motor manufacturers have probably not really thought through yet.

The idea of saying that people have to install safety-critical updates immediately is something that we recommend. As for the detail of how it should be dealt with in the Bill, I have to plead ignorance, but the reason for pushing for it is that we honestly believe that if a manufacturer has updated the software, it is to make the vehicle perform better. These are not iPhones that can only annoy other people; these are vehicles that can kill other people. Those updates should be mandatory in whatever way we can make them so.

[Iain Stewart]

Q Forgive me, but I am not clear how these updates would actually happen—whether you would have to take the vehicle into a dealership or garage.

David Williams: Tesla currently does them over the air.

[Iain Stewart]

Q If you were rushing out of the house at 9 o’clock and you got an email from the manufacturer that said, “Version 1.7 is now available and you need to install it”, and you thought, “I’m running late for a meeting—I’ll do it at the end of the day”, would that fall foul?

David Williams: I think the Bill is trying to allow for some delay, but a reasonable delay, and does not want people to deliberately and unnecessarily stall. If an update is coming through—if they have found a fatal flaw in the software that is likely to make your vehicle veer off the road—my view is that that vehicle should be immobile until the software update is implemented. The motor manufacturers would be able to build that into their technology and machines if they wanted to.

[Iain Stewart]

Q If the upgrade is so safety-critical that the car will not function without it having been installed, is that something we should put in the Bill?

David Williams: My understanding is that that sounds very good in principle, but how do you define that extent? Many upgrades might have a degree of safety- critical improvements in their nature. How would you define the seriousness of the upgrade?

Ben Howarth: Clause 4(6)(b) is a definition—that feels to me like it means that it is unsafe to use. If you started saying at this stage a car must be immobilised, we would potentially be legislating for things that we do not know the manufacturers will do in every circumstance. There might be times when the car could move. It might be safe to move it at 20 miles per hour or so—I am just speculating. Is it right to put it in the Bill at this stage? I would definitely say that it is something that needs to be carefully defined and thought about when you create the list of automated vehicles. I know we keep coming back to “the list is everything”, but I think the list is the mechanism by which many of the potential problems of the Bill will get solved.

[Graham P. Jones (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Q I am interested in the collection, retention and distribution of data and also the issue that has just been raised by my colleagues about the software prescription; whether it will be prescribed that software must be updated and all the problems that might ensue from that.

Let me lay out an example and ask your view of the Bill. If somebody switches to manual from automated and is involved in an accident while in excess of 30 miles per hour. What happens next? How much of that data becomes available in the case that ensues? For instance, I presume that speed would be used, but what about the on-board cameras or anything else? How much of this data will be kept, retained and used from the functions of the vehicle for a case in which there is an accident with a driver in manual mode? Does the Bill provide a robust framework for accidents and insurance claims and what about road safety? Will it enhance road safety or are we stopping at legitimate information for insurance companies? Should the Bill also include data made available so that road safety is improved?

Iwan Parry: The basis of the question is around the availability of data. My technical background is in forensic accident investigation and in order to investigate accidents—to get to the root cause—we need to start at the before-accident period and understand as much as we can. We are limited today to things such as skid marks, as David referred to earlier, as the tools to reconstruct those accidents. The kinds of data that are potentially available from electronic vehicles increase the amount of data significantly. With the cameras, radar, lidar—light detection and ranging—and ultrasonic sensors we can get a very clear picture of what was going on around the vehicle at the time of an incident. When we look at the consequences of an incident, we can put the two together and have a very clear understanding from establishing liability and whether that indicates that the vehicle in some way behaved unreasonably—or that the driver, pedestrian or cyclist that it was interacting with behaved unreasonably given the context of the situation. That gives us the information that would allow us to make a determination on liability. I think that is critical to insurers, to police investigating such incidents and to road safety in the future.

To advance the future legislation on autonomous vehicles, we will need a method to understand what is going wrong in the real world. We will also need a method to use that information to improve our understanding of vehicle functioning in the real world and how that can be improved by manufacturers or by legislators applying the right tools to ensure that vehicle performance is improved over time.

Ben Howarth: If I could add the insurance perspective on that, for what we need to do for this Bill—to establish whether the car was in automated or manual mode—we need a fairly limited amount of data. You mentioned speed, but we do not necessarily need speed to do that. We just need to know whether it was in automated mode. There are potentially lots of other uses for car data for the police and for accident investigators. In a disputed claim with contradictory evidence in court, you could find it a lot easier to solve cases with data, but I would draw a distinction between the data that insurers need to make this Bill operational and the data from cars that would be useful to understand claims. That might be a valid concern for vehicles not covered by this Bill; as cars get more technically sophisticated with more assisted functions, you might want to understand more about how it works for any car. I think whether it is reasonable to ask for data is still best managed via a judge.

It is also important, if we want the data, that manufacturers record it. My understanding is that at the moment, if you hit a pedestrian in an accident, you will not necessarily trigger an airbag so the data that the car keeps on a rolling basis are not automatically recorded or stored and they would not be available. As part of the work to define an automated car, we need more clarity about what data are recorded and stored and about the process to ensure that the data are sent to the right people at the right time. An insurer is one party that would want some of the data.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Chair]

I think we have got the message.

[Iain Stewart]

Q This is just a supplementary question on your earlier point about Ireland and California having a harmonised payment mechanism. Did that come about just from the industry creating it or was there Government regulation or legislation?

Robert Llewellyn: Absolutely from legislation, yes. The system in California, which I am more familiar with, was chaotic. I do not know quite what happened in Ireland, but it was catastrophic. It was a simple bit of Government legislation from the Californian state legislature that insisted that there was one system, that you could use all public chargers. I believe it is a dongle rather than an app. That might have changed—I have not been there for a while—but it certainly was that.

[Iain Stewart]

Q So that is something you would like this Bill, or another piece of legislation, to do.

Robert Llewellyn: That would be an amazing change, and I think it would ease in a lot of people who have not adopted electric cars: “How do I charge it?” “You just walk up there and it charges.” That would be a big change.

[Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington) (Lab)]

Q It is great to be in the company of someone so evangelical about EVs. You have probably seen the ambition for the introduction of electric vehicles and the replacement of petrol and diesel by 2040, and an outright ban by 2050. Do you think we are being ambitious enough compared with other nations, and what it is that other nations are doing that perhaps we could learn from?

Robert Llewellyn: I was very pleased when I heard that announcement. Technology might overtake it. There is a strong argument for that among the evangelical electric vehicle users, from whom I try to stand one step back and be a little more objective. But it is such a hard thing to do. I have seen so many graphs to describe the uptake of new technologies and how this will be what happens with electric vehicles—the S-curve of adoption.

Our emotional relationship with cars is really complicated. It is deeper than our emotional relationship was with landline telephones or how television is viewed—all those things. It is more complex than that; I do not think it is quite as simple. I think you could be more ambitious. You could go with 2030, the technology is advancing so much.

The simple fact is that the car I have had the longest—a Nissan Leaf—has a 24kWh battery. There is now the new Nissan Leaf and the battery pack is exactly the same size and it is a 40kWh battery. That more than doubles the range of my very battered dirty old Nissan Leaf that I drove to the train station today. Sorry, no more piffle.