The Labour government must learn lessons from the United States on the rollout of autonomous vehicles – also known as driverless cars or ‘robotaxis’ – if they are to have any chance of success in this country, a leading expert in the field has insisted.
Lessons must be learnt if autonomous vehicles are to have mileage in the UK, an academic has argued (Credit: anyaberkut/iStock)
In a new article published by The University of Manchester’s policy engagement unit, Policy@Manchester, Dr Sam Hind recalls that one of the final bills passed by the outgoing Conservative government was the Automated Vehicles Act 2024, designed to make provisions for the possible introduction of autonomous vehicles in the UK.
But he warns that their deployment in America has been “on a rocky path” since initial public tests in 2020.
Dr Hind reveals that, in October 2023, the California Department of Motor Vehicles – the body responsible for regulating vehicle licenses in the state – suspended the operations of a robotaxi firm, Cruise, which had been running an autonomous service in San Francisco for two and a half months. “Cruise’s suspension was understood to be the result of its failure to cooperate with an investigation into a road traffic incident one of their vehicles was involved in,” he writes. “According to reports, a pedestrian who had been hit by an ordinary vehicle (driven by a human) had subsequently ended up underneath a Cruise robotaxi (being driven ‘autonomously’).”
The University of Manchester academic explains that similar stories have also made the headlines, most notably the death of Elaine Herzberg, killed by an autonomous Uber vehicle being tested in Tempe, Arizona.
Based on his own research findings, he suggests that the UK should learn from the “bumpy rollout” of robotaxis in the US – with a specific focus on developments in California where Cruise and Google/Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle division, Waymo, sought to expand their operations.
“Key Californian public transportation authorities, responsible for millions of transportation users across the state, banded together to propose a more responsible approach to the deployment of robotaxis,” he writes.
Dr Sam Hind, Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture, The University of Manchester
“They called this the principle of ‘incrementalism.’ In short, that any prospective robotaxi operator seeking to gain permission for running services in San Francisco or anywhere else across California should need to pass specific, standardised performance milestones before further approval or expansion might be granted. Though this may appear an obvious suggestion to outsiders, this was not the permission process undertaken by these companies, who had refused to hand over certain kinds of operational data of their robotaxi vehicles, claiming commercial confidentiality rules.”
In his piece, Dr Hind argues that any regulatory environment for the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles in the UK should require firms to submit “relevant operational data such as the frequency of unplanned stops and so-called ‘vehicle retrieval events’ – key indicators of the performance and reliability of underlying autonomous vehicle, AI, and machine vision systems.”
Amongst a series of further recommendations to UK policymakers, he also calls for the regulation of autonomous vehicles to be the responsibility of a single body such as “the recently-announced Regulatory Innovation Office, tasked with speeding up public access to new technologies.” He adds: “A close partnership with the Department of Transport on such matters would be wise.”
‘A future for autonomous vehicles in the UK? Lessons from the US,’ by Dr Sam Hind is available to read on the Policy@Manchester website.