The vehicle might be autonomous but you’ll have to pilot the insurance policy yourself
Liability going into reverse
You know that sweaty, anxious-looking passenger walking down the aisle of the aeroplane, clutching their backpack tightly with white knuckles? The nervous, fidgety passenger you just know is going to sit next to you?
That’s me, that is. I do not fly well.
Some in-flight medication is required to help me through the ordeal. Usually, I turn to a traditional herbal remedy derived from juniper berry oil and grain alcohol. To this, I add some carbonated water flavoured with a little quinine plus a slice of lemon.
Five of those and a bag of nuts usually does the trick.
Go on, tell me how safe air travel is compared with apparently mundane life choices such as crossing the road with your eyes shut. My negative apprehension is unfounded, you’re telling me: we are simply hurtling through turbulent clouds at 550mph, 20,000 feet up, in a skinny metal tube piloted by a Roger Moore impersonator who’s had less sleep in the last 48 hours than a junior doctor on A&E. What is there to worry about?
On the basis that knowledge is power, I was advised to learn more about the safety systems on modern aircraft, thereby assuring myself of the extreme rarity of a passenger flight turning deadly. So I watched every episode of TV documentary series Air Crash Investigation. I am now an expert in everything from insects nesting in pitot tubes to gorillas dancing on the wings.
When I am obliged to travel by air for work reasons, Mme D always insists that I leave her a sheet of paper listing all my IDs and passwords for online banking, pension and life insurance, “just in case”, before wishing me a nice flight. Every time, I feel like I’m in the opening scene of an episode of Columbo.
I would much rather travel by train. Sure, trains are noisy and uncomfortable and jostle about a lot, but you can wiggle in your seat without spilling everyone’s coffee within nine rows’ vicinity. You’re not told to switch off and store away your laptop every time you leave or enter a station. The washroom is wider than your hips.
And although waiting on a platform for a train to turn up is boring, at least when you arrive at your destination, you’re actually at your destination rather than in some windy field 50 fucking miles away.
It’s still not door-to-door, though, so you can imagine how keenly I look forward to autonomous vehicles: not only are they even closer to the ground than trains, you get a proper comfy seat, warm interior, great music, everything within easy reach, all your gadgets on recharge, and you don’t have to check every 10 minutes whether your suitcase has been stolen.
If the self-driving car manufacturers could add in a coffee machine and toilet – I would definitely pay the premium if the driver’s seat slid away to reveal a gurgling flushable bowl beneath in the style of the Thunderbirds opening sequence – it would be perfect.
I have heard it said that autonomous vehicles take the pleasure out of driving. What pleasure? Everyone hates driving.
Sure, there are drivers who claim to be “keen motorists” but what they actually mean is that they enjoy pointing a car along an empty road in the countryside surrounded by pretty scenery that they are not supposed to be looking at.
That’s not driving. That’s just twiddling a steering wheel, roaring the engine on every climb and jamming the brakes late at every corner, flinging your passengers around like rag dolls as they coat your leather trimmings with projectile vomit. A child of 18 months could do that – as well as being able to produce their own projectile vomit, which suggests they would multitask better than most adult drivers.
But as soon as you put a keen motorist alongside millions of other keen motorists, collectively known as ‘traffic’, they hate every second of it. ‘Traffic’ is where 99 per cent of all driving takes place, hence being stuck in traffic is what driving really is: repeatedly nudging forward a few feet and stopping, walled in on all sides by your fellow fuming nose-pickers, and only occasionally breaking away and getting your car into third gear for a few seconds before having to slow down at the next traffic light, junction or roundabout.
I would very happily sacrifice such dubious pleasures for sitting in a cocoon on wheels that did all that stuff for me while I did something else, such as read or sleep or watch a film. What movie is streaming today? Crash? Great.
The thing is, keynote futurists and other such deadheads have been insisting for years that mass-market autonomous vehicles are, heh, just around the corner – but they still aren’t. One assumes that if gobshites keep announcing “This will be the year of the self-driving car!” eventually they will be correct, assuming they don’t die of old age or get knocked down by a Tesla first.
Speaking of whom, Tesla Motors is being dragged back to court to refute accusations that it has been overblowing claims about its advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Possibly Tesla thinks people are getting unnecessarily cross over semantics. As we are now learning, Tesla’s ‘Autopilot’ feature requires you to steer the wheel and apply the brakes. In Teslathinkland, ‘auto’ means you have to do it yourself. Obvious, really: Tesla software is certainly not driving it for you, so the car must be driving itself by magic as far as they’re concerned.
Oh, and those self-driving demonstration videos? Apparently we were supposed to treat them as if they were crowdfunding videos for products that might exist one day if they reach the stretch funding milestone… perhaps, maybe, dunno, who knows?
US software billionaire Dan O’Dowd is so cross about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD)quality control (or lack of) that he had even considered standing as a presidential candidate on a single-issue ticket. Instead, he paid for an ad during the Super Bowl that tore apart the exaggerated claims of manufacturers of autonomous vehicles.
Enjoy this brief clip as O’Dowd rides as passenger alongside investment banker and Tesla fan Ross Gerber and the mad car self-drives through a Stop sign at speed.
O’Dowd’s principal gripe with the company is that it doesn’t seem to correct the many and well-documented problems with FSD. We’ve all experienced unreliable software from time to time: that’s probably par for the course when everyone’s tripping over their own feet in order to be innovative. He just thinks that you shouldn’t be doing that with mission-critical applications. Ignoring the problems or telling everyone you’ve fixed them when you haven’t isn’t the right thing to do.
“In March, in North Carolina, a self-driving Tesla blew past a school bus with its red lights flashing and hit a child in the road, just like we showed in our Super Bowl commercial,” said O’Dowd in an interview with IEEE Spectrum. “And Tesla still maintains that FSD will not blow past a school bus with its lights flashing and stop sign extended, and it will not hit a child crossing the road.”
Yikes.
A snarky middle-aged rich dude is one thing but I don’t fancy Elon’s chances in a a shouting match – or even an arm-wrestling match – with US Navy ex-fighter pilot Missy Cummings. Previously a university professor in Engineering, in 2021 she joined the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and quickly incurred the ire of Twitter’s chief twat. For reasons he could not understand, her role at NHTSA involved pushing for safer standards in AVs.
Now back in academia at George Mason University, Virginia, Cummings also spoke to IEEE Spectrum about her reservations about Tesla’s Autopilot. In the interview, she bemoaned the lack of detailed independent research data on the safety implications, either good or bad, of AVs. Are you more or less likely to crash? Nobody knows. “But if you are in an accident, you’re more likely to be injured,” she says, “because people in ADAS-equipped cars are more likely to be speeding.”
For her, a car should be either 100% fully autonomous (none are, yet) or 100% piloted by a human, albeit with software assistance. Problems arise when nobody’s quite sure whether the car they’re driving is one or the other, and this is made worse by over-optimistic sales pitches that suggest ADAS features make a car autonomous – when in fact it is nothing of the sort.
Now I am as scared to be a pedestrian as I am to be an air passenger. If these cars are going to be crashing into everyone and everything, perhaps the safest place to be – relatively speaking – is inside the car itself. But then who picks up the bill when the AV accidents happen?
Insurance companies have been chatting to manufacturers about this for the last 10 years. Manufacturers accept the principle that accidents in full AVs can be attributed to software, which means they have to pick up the bill. But I do wonder what would happen in practice if someone else in an AV drives into me in my AV and neither of us were “at the wheel”, as it were. The manufacturers won’t just roll over and pay up, will they? They’ll sue and counter-sue for evermore; especially if both cars were built by the same manufacturer.
What worries the insurance companies more, however, is that while all such legal pranging is going on, they have to pay a garage to make the repairs. An AV will cost considerably more to repair than panel-beating out a few dents.
But all this is just blah. You and I have lived and worked in this ol’ IT industry for long enough to know what will really happen. What’s the first thing you’re forced to do when you fire up a new gadget, install software or register an online service, for example?
That’s right: you have to click ‘Agree’ next to a mile-high document of micro print containing Terms & Conditions that absolve the manufacturer of all liability. That one tickbox will mean an AV can do anything from skip a red light to spontaneously tear you limb from limb when you reach 70mph, all the while legally enshrining blame in the owner, i.e. you.
Mind how you go.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He would like to introduce a new monthly feature in this sign-off: Dabbsy’s Unmissable Monthly Product. His inaugural DUMP is…. Patty’s Power Panties. Because wearing the right shreds, designed by a celebrity psychic, can “empower the wearer with confidence”. Elon wears three.
Hmmmm. I enjoy driving for itself. There are few other pursuits which require such a combination of mental and physical skills. In some ways, it is driving in traffic (not traffic jams) that is the most skillful - driving smoothly, safely and courteously is very satisfying. Driving on e.g.an empty motorway (possibly the safest of driving conditions) is just an exercise in not going to sleep.
It's going to take me a long time to wish for autonomous cars, despite their possible advantages for some sorts of driving.
Good commentary. Getting users to test prototypes is perfectly ok when dealing with business application systems. Even financial mistakes can generally be corrected with a journal. Different when software is driving robotics though. The necessary disciplines involved are miles removed from most commercial software development. I wonder if we have the necessary skills anywhere to develop the software for truly autonomous cars?