30 March 2015

While retailers have rushed headlong to the end of the biggest new car sales month of the year, last week’s SMMT Connected conference looked much further ahead.

The Connected conference discussed connected and autonomous cars and the over-riding concern was that of road and data safety.

The driving ethos behind autonomous vehicles is to eliminate accidents – it’s a safer way of travelling. To me (and all of the car manufacturers I spoke to on the day) the only way to ensure ongoing safety of autonomous cars is to make 100% sure they are maintained by properly trained technicians. As I’ve said before on this blog: you just can’t have  enthusiastic DIYers fiddling with autonomous cars.

So I was  surprised when transport minister Robert Goodwill was dismissive towards licensing garages; after all, the Government favours for safety’s sake the licensing of electricians and gas fitters . However, as Mike Hawes pointed out on the day, there is a lot of ground to cover before we see these cars on sale.

And given that when a car becomes autonomous and responsibility for accidents passes from the driver to the car (in reality the car manufacturer), the product liability lawyers won’t allow anyone other than trained technicians work on the vehicles.

I suspect that when we reach this point, a legislative solution will be the only way forward.

Tristan Young

Tags: autonomous cars, government, licensing, self driving