Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill

John Pugh Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons & Carry-over motion: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons & Ways and Means resolution: House of Commons
Monday 6th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Chris Grayling]

I am aware of that issue. I am happy to give my hon. Friend such an assurance and to discuss the issue with her.

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

I want to probe the Secretary of State on this business about autonomous vehicles and the responsibility of the passenger—or the driver, who is I suppose a passenger in this respect—while the vehicle is in autonomous mode. When the driver is not in control of the vehicle and the vehicle is in autonomous mode, is the driver exonerated of all legal responsibility? Is that the principle of the Bill, because surely it cannot be as simple as that?

[Chris Grayling]

The measures focus on insurance. If the vehicle is under its own control, the insurance principle is still applicable. If the insurance policy applies to the driver and the driver is not driving the vehicle, by definition the driver cannot be at fault. Under the provisions in the Bill, it will be possible to have an insurance policy that covers both eventualities of something going wrong: when the driver is driving; and when the vehicle is in autonomous mode. That is one of the key changes necessary to create an environment in which such vehicles can operate freely on the roads.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Pugh (Southport) (LD)]

This modest Bill is clearly uncontentious. It seeks to adjust legislation to new technology, but from the red flag Acts onwards the House of Commons has not been great on anticipating either the potential or pitfalls of technological advance. Victorian Members used to fulminate against the railways, on the grounds that they led to revolution and moral torpor. In truth, it would have been hard for those Members to have anticipated the astounding success of the internal combustion engine, and the huge behavioural, commercial and social change that flowed from it.

Cars are potential killing machines driven by millions of people, of a variety of dispositions and intelligences. The fact that the car does not simply create havoc is due to intelligent legislation which has evolved over time. As I am sure the Minister would agree, it is always better to have legislation in place before we get to the problems, rather than after. I apologise if at this point I sound like a petrol head—the hon. Member for Wycombe (Mr Baker) has confessed to being one and I must, too—but I am sure that we have not quite sized up all the problems relating to these new cars and new technologies. Indeed, we probably cannot do so. I recognise that autonomous cars and electric cars exist as developed technologies and will only improve, and that we already have satisfactory transport in the sky and on the rails which is almost autonomous. We also know, and we all agree, that human error is the principal cause of accidents. However, successfully trialling a few vehicles on an open road in California or in dedicated areas in the UK does not enable us to figure out, in any easy way, the consequences of their mass adoption, especially within a heavily congested network with a mixed ecology of driven and autonomous vehicles. Sure, we need to get insurance for those that exist and charging capacity for electrics, but what will mass roll-out look like? What desirable and undesirable behavioural changes will result?

I am sceptical about the mass adoption of electric vehicles, which may be a strange thing for a Liberal Democrat to say, as the party has always been massively enthusiastic on this score. However, there are big implications for the grid; for greenhouse emissions, as this depends on how we actually generate the electricity and how clean that is; for the streetscape and for planning authorities; for the world’s resources, given all these batteries which, to some extent, use rare elements; and for the second-hand market, which is not doing so well in electric vehicles, and on which I heavily depend.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Gentleman is making a fine speech, from a luddite perspective. I appreciate that he was instrumental in passing the red flag Acts through this House in the early 1900s, but surely he can see the liberation of resources and of planning-scape, the reduction of the impact of the vehicle and the liberation of the citizen that all that can bring.

[John Pugh]

Not necessarily, but I did listen to the hon. Gentleman talking about the Deputy Speaker’s voyage to the airport and saying that he would not need to leave his car in the car park. The hon. Gentleman was looking on the positive side, but we can also look at the negative side: the Deputy Speaker’s car has had to travel back to parts of Lancashire and then come out to get him again, so he has filled up the road more. We can spin these things either way.

[Tom Tugendhat]

I am terribly grateful that the hon. Gentleman is giving me the opportunity to reply, but he is assuming a level of ownership of today’s vehicle that is simply not relevant. If one looks at a vehicle as a means of transportation and sees it more in the form of a train, one sees that Mr Deputy Speaker uses a vehicle to get him to the airport and then gets out and gets on his plane, and somebody else gets in the vehicle and goes all the way back to Lancashire. Lucky Lancashire, to have spared the use of two cars.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

The good thing is that I do not have a plane, either.

[John Pugh]

We invented the train some time ago; there are trains available, even in Lancashire. My fundamental point is that electric vehicles are probably a less flexible technology than either the internal combustion engine or the hydrogen fuel cell, and the technology is wholly inapplicable in the case of heavy goods vehicles, in which they surely do not have much of a place. Even if I am wrong about that, there are some legislative problems if we anticipate a silent city of electric vehicles moving about at pace and the hazards that that may present for pedestrian safety.

What would prevent drivers of ordinary cars from bullying autonomous vehicles in the knowledge that they must give way? They might cut out at junctions, as I believe they already intend to do. What responsibility does a driver or owner have when he initiates a journey? He may be tempted to plan a journey much longer or more hazardous—for example, at night—than he previously might have done, or more frequently than if he had to drive himself. Would he have to nominate a co-pilot, and what would be the safety protocols there? Can the roads cope with possible additional vehicle use? People have anticipated elderly people who had given up using their cars returning to them, and the use of cars by disabled people becoming far more common.

[Stewart Malcolm McDonald]

I fear the hon. Gentleman sounds as though he would have argued, when the lightbulb was invented, that candle makers would be put out of business. I hear a lot of negatives, some of which I accept are entirely valid concerns, but can he enlighten us as to the Liberal Democrats’ vision for this new, innovative technology, on which we cannot be left behind?

[John Pugh]

I am presenting my personal observations. The hon. Gentleman has acknowledged that there are problems and I am simply alluding to them.

[Alan Brown]

Did the hon. Gentleman not make the case for autonomous vehicles when he talked about people potentially making long-distance journeys when they are tired? The whole problem with drivers at the moment is that they fall asleep at the wheel and lose concentration. Autonomous vehicles must be an improvement on that.

[John Pugh]

We are just looking at different sides of the same problems. It is quite obvious that people will not get tired in autonomous vehicles in the same way, but they will then perhaps make longer journeys than they otherwise might have. Both points remain valid.

If people are going to go along the motorways in convoy and at the right speed all the time, have we not considered the thought that everybody could get into the same vehicle? Have we not, through a back door, invented the bus all over again?

There are imponderables from a manufacturers’ side. It is easy enough to insist on technology that does not let people drive if it is unsafe, but once they are on the road, vehicle failure midstream is always a possibility, even if the software is up to date. There might be unexpected damage to sensors or equipment because of conditions such as bad weather or through accidental damage. In responding to a change of circumstance mid-journey, at what point is it the driver’s responsibility? If road signals fail, road markings are obscured or traffic is unexpectedly redirected in a haphazard fashion, at what point does the manufacturer, the council or the passenger take the blame should an accident occur?

We can leave out all the hypothetical moral dilemmas involving nuns or how a vehicle would distinguish between a black bin bag waving and a child frozen in terror when collision is inevitable. Machines would make different calculations, and I am sure there would be solutions. I suspect that with the development of artificial intelligence, machines will better reflect our moral preferences and become smarter. The other day, I was torturing myself by thinking about what would happen if two autonomous vehicles met on a single road, on which one could not pass the other, and one had to give way but both systems predicted that the other would. One would have a sort of parallel to the Balaam’s ass dilemma.

The Bill is a modest attempt to tackle the issues I have outlined. The pious hope behind it is that the tricky issues will eventually be ironed out in court. But courts can operate only within the law they have, and my expectation is that technology will move faster than the law and we will be back here soon.