Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Tuesday 20th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, like many noble Lords, I also welcome the Bill as an heroic attempt to deal with the challenges. It certainly has not dealt with them all but it is a good start.

The complexity is well illustrated in the schedule, which to me demonstrates the need for a comprehensive review of all road traffic legislation. I know we will not get that at the moment; it would be a lawyer’s paradise. But the Minister mentioned some work by the Law Commission, which I found interesting. Its work seems a bit delayed. Five years ago, the Law Commission produced an excellent report on making level crossings safer not only for trains but for cars, lorries and so on, and we still have not seen any legislation about that. If there is to be legislation, I hope this Bill does not jump the queue.

The term “automated vehicles” also applies to railways and shipping, where they are happening. We have not yet heard how you would rescue a ship in the middle of the Atlantic if the whole thing fails, but no doubt we will. I think drones are excluded, but the noble Viscount, Lord Goschen, talked about air. It all comes back to public acceptance. There is already a trucking experiment—probably more than that—going on in Germany. What are called “platoons”—of three trucks, I think—are driving down what I think is a private motorway. I am told that they have even found a way of having two platoons driving together in adjacent lanes and automatically hitching and unhitching the second or third truck with no driver in it between one and the other. I shall not explain where they could have come from, but they would all be going along at the same pace. How you deal with other people who want to overtake in a car, goodness knows. That is happening, and one of the failures of the Bill is that it does not take into account the road freight sector, where the challenges are probably different. The results may be different, but it is definitely happening. On the whole, a greater number of professional drivers are driving or controlling them than there possibly are in the private car sector.

Clause 1 refers to the listing of automated vehicles and their data. I think many noble Lords will have received a briefing from the Association of British Insurers which sums up the problems of insurance very nicely. For me, the most important thing is for the Government to ensure that users of automated vehicles are able to demonstrate that their vehicle was in a fully automated mode to exercise their rights under the legislation. What commitment can the Minister give us that the data confirming the status of the vehicle at the time of a crash will be made available to insurers and the public? I hope the answer is that it will be, because it is fundamental.

What happens to pedestrians and cyclists on a road where some of the vehicles may be in automatic mode and some may be being driven by one’s stepmother who cannot drive, has never had a licence and has forgotten how to turn a corner? Then there are many examples that we know of, involving people on scooters and things like that.

I worry about the definition of a vehicle driving itself, which the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, mentioned. It may be going along by itself, but it is under the control of somebody. It may be a computer or a human being playing some kind of game of Matchbox cars or something, but somebody is in control. This whole idea of the vehicle driving itself will be a bit of a get-out somehow.

The other issue is that if a vehicle is in an automatic mode, I do not believe it can possibly break the law. If it did, like a lot of motorists and truck drivers do today, it is not just about the weight of the vehicle, its speed and whether it has turned right in the wrong place, because that is all recorded, or it should be. We have to accept that everybody will be watched by Big Brother all time and will not disobey the law; otherwise they will presumably have their password removed and will not be able to control the thing any more.

There is another question related to that. You get power failures and breakdowns of computers. At some stage, these vehicles will break down, for whatever reason, and one has to find a way of rescuing them and making them go again. As many noble Lords will know, if your computer breaks down, someone—whether it is you, the retailer or someone else—has to try to start it again, and that sometimes takes a long time. That is a question that we need to look at.

On charging points, I do not think the needs of the trucking industry have been looked at. There need to be many more such points. In the future, I think most of them will be smart, for the reasons that the Minister and other noble Lords have given. There will be a need to get a quick charge and for your vehicle’s battery to feed back into the grid, if that is thought to be a good idea and it makes money, to get rid of the peaks and troughs.

It is essential that we have one common socket. That may seem a very small point, but many people drive to the continent—we will still go there after Brexit, I am sure—and many continental cars and vehicles will come here. Let us learn from the horrible divergence of power sockets in Europe at the moment. The Swiss have one, most of the rest of the continent has another and we have a different one again. There are very good reasons for that, but let us try to have one common socket everywhere so that they are completely interchangeable. I think we shall need one socket outside everyone’s property, if they still own a car. I am not convinced that everyone will own cars by then; I think they will hire them when they want to travel, which is another challenge. We must have many more smart charging points, taking into account not just heavy goods vehicles and so on but taxis—Uber, black cabs or whatever we like—because otherwise how will they work when the vehicle works 24 hours a day and they want a very quick charge?

I am sure a lot of interesting amendments will come up in Committee and thereafter, but I wish the Bill well. Let us hope we all try to improve it.