Autonomous Vehicles

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Borwick, on having secured this debate, and I commiserate with him that so few noble Lords have felt driven to contribute—that is a sophisticated joke. They are probably all stuck in their autonomous cars somewhere on the other side of the city.

In future most cars will be electric and a substantial proportion will be autonomous, driven with minimal or zero driver involvement. We are not talking about the distant future here but about a period of no more than 20 years. Each of those elements has a much longer history than many people imagine. Henry Ford began experimenting with an electric car at the turn of the century. His wife, Clara, always drove an electric car; she refused to have a Model T. Several electric cars of different makes were produced; they had a range of about 80 miles, but the record for an electric car was about 280 miles, which is about the same as the current record for electric cars. It is interesting to note that one of the reasons why electric cars did not take off was that they were feminised, seen as appropriate for women, not for macho men—and most drivers at the time were men. The same thing applies to driverless cars. A driverless car was demonstrated in 1925 in New York. It was built by an organisation called Houdina Radio Control Co., and was controlled by radio waves from a second car travelling behind.

Most of those applications have also been developed in the context of war, especially autonomous vehicles of numerous kinds. In the 1930s the USSR had teletanks, which were controlled by vehicles following them from behind. Pilotless drones are everywhere today—every day 5,000 drones are sent up into the air by the United States—so the idea of an autonomous vehicle should not just be confined to cars on the road, as it is part of a more generic and extremely important trend.

Today we are witnessing a period of dramatic technological change. What is going on in the motor industry looks as though it will revolutionise that industry even more thoroughly than Henry Ford did in the early part of the 20th century. The UK must not just participate in that but try to be at the forefront. It will not be easy, but there are gigantic investment opportunities. Everybody has heard of the Google Self-Driving Car; I am not sure that it has driven 700,000 miles, but it has done a lot of miles anyway. It has only driven on motorways and has not yet been pioneered within the more testing environment of suburban driving. However, it is a mistake to concentrate only on that version, and I would like to make a few points about that.

First, many other manufacturers, including some that produce here, already have self-driving cars. Some say that they will have them in production within 10 years. These are not adapted cars, as in the case of Google; they are specially built cars and they are almost universally electric. Secondly, this is not an all-or-nothing process. Many cars already have developed forms of automation—for example, automatic braking, self-parking and keeping distance from the car in front —and far more sophisticated add-ons are in production. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an autonomous vehicle; there are many gradations in all this.

Thirdly, it would be a massive mistake to concentrate only on autonomous vehicles. It is a mistake that the Government must not make. We are talking about an imminent revolution in traffic systems, with the digitalisation of transport, which is happening inside the car but also happening with much broader aspects of traffic behaviour, and which is extremely promising and interesting. I do not know whether the Minister knows of the MIT study on the future of the automobile; if not, it is worth checking out. MIT has been in the forefront of some of the research involved in the evolution of autonomous vehicles. Broadly speaking, the MIT study sees something like a total revolution occurring in traffic systems, in which most cars will not only be driverless but enmeshed in a complex system of traffic possibilities, making traffic massively easier than it is at the moment, as MIT says. MIT talks of a mobility internet as the future of the automobile, and give lots of pictures of these cars, which already exist in structure and form. It is crucial to see that the autonomous car is part of a much wider evolution of the emergence of transport systems, and this is going to be much more of a revolution than the autonomous car itself. The Minister will know that there are already functioning aspects of this; for example, there are streets in Texas that no longer have traffic lights. Certain cars do not need traffic lights—it is all governed by digital technology. This is the future. As I would stress all the way through, it is not the abstract future. It took the internet less than 20 years to dominate the world, so we will see far faster changes in these industries than we ever saw before. You cannot use pre-existing timescales as a measure.

As the noble Lord, Lord Borwick has said, there are plenty of problems, including that of liability for damage. Drivers might lose the experience of driving a car. What happens if the system fails? But the benefits are immense, as he also said. To add to his statistics, 40 million people were killed in traffic accidents in the 20th century, and more than double that amount globally were seriously injured. We are talking about a lethal instrument in the automobile. We should also recognise that 90% of accidents come from driver error, most of which can in principle be avoided, not just through the autonomous car but through the automation of traffic systems. The MIT study also envisages very different patterns of ownership. Cars would not just be privately owned; there would be all sorts of public-private ownership schemes.

I finish by posing some questions for the Minister to answer. First, could the Government clarify what resources they are providing for the development of autonomous cars and systems? I have seen estimates ranging from £75 million upwards, but I could not find much concrete data about what exists. If it is £75 million, my response would be, “You’ve got to be kidding”. I hope that it is a lot more. The state of California has already set aside about $5 billion. There is no way that the UK is going to be in the vanguard, if that is the case.

Secondly, do the Government recognise the scale of the likely revolution in transport? It cannot be driven primarily by private capital because of its enmeshment in transport systems. Small experiments like the one that is going on in Milton Keynes, which the Government are supporting, are worth while, but they are miles away from the scale on which we need to think.

Thirdly, are the Government investigating different types of ownership, as I just mentioned the MIT study suggests? How would these best be integrated with increasingly digitalised traffic management? Is, for example, the slightly notorious Uber management system actually the wave of the future because it makes possible a very different relationship to ownership of the vehicle?

Fourthly and finally, will the Government work to make sure that the coming revolution in transport will not be confined to the developed countries? We saw what happened with the mobile phone in Africa. African countries have been able to leapfrog technologies. We should make it possible for them to leapfrog technologies in transport systems too.