Would you trust a driverless auto?

Would you trust a driverless vehicle?

It is a easy query, but think about it – would you be able to sit back and let your vehicle do the driving?

For most, if not all drivers, letting the tech take more than and negotiate traffic would take a enormous leap of faith – specially if you’re the sort of driver who’s already a terrible passenger in any automobile.

Ever pump an imaginary brake pedal in the passenger seat foot-properly? Believed so.

Wheels of fortune

To prove the point that we’re all a bit twitchy when it comes to driverless tech, a survey from Autotrader has identified an overwhelming majority (95%) of motorists have concerns more than no matter whether the cars could safely navigate the UK’s busy public roads.

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The survey of more than 1,000 British motorists also discovered almost 2-thirds (60%) wouldn’t trust an automated automobile on the school run – though in my encounter the college run tends to be completed on auto-pilot anyway – whilst over half (56%) would never even think about owning  one.

And just more than one-in-10 (12%) are fearful of the threat of cyber auto crime, whereby criminals use a computer to hack into your vehicle to take handle of it.

So are these fears properly-founded, or just a massive scale case of technophobia?

The rise of the cyber-criminal

Even though it sounds like something from an old sci-fi film, cyber vehicle crime is on the rise.

Just last week Theresa Could MP, the Residence Secretary, announced one in 3 cars are stolen by hackers who use tech to bypass remote locking and ignition systems.

This backs up figures from the London Met, Britain’s biggest police force, which indicate far more than a third of vehicles stolen in the capital are not driven away employing a important.

And if a car’s systems are totally automated, this signifies hackers could make off with a vehicle remotely – as Pentagon security experts identified when they were capable to take handle of the accelerator, brakes, steering and dashboard displays of an SUV using nothing at all much more than a laptop and a video games console controller.

So, it looks like an improve in cyber automobile crime is a genuine worry, but what about these security concerns?

The rise of the technophobe?

When it comes to the security of driverless vehicles, the figures speak for themselves. Google’s fleet of self-driving SUVs have now covered a lot more than 700,000 miles and the only recorded collision came after 300,000 miles, and that was when a human driver rear-ended it!

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Even so, the roads of the UK and the US are very distinct. Effective trials on one particular side of the Atlantic will not necessarily translate to the other.

So we probably will not know if the security fears are effectively-founded till the testing begins early next year.

However, the very good old British weather could stop Google’s 1st wave of driverless automobiles as it is been suggested they cannot cope with snow, heavy rain or potholes.

If correct, this would render the Google auto all but redundant in the UK and place it appropriate up there alongside the Sinclair C5 when it comes to failed automotive innovation.

Would you trust a driverless car? If not, what would be your biggest reservation? Let us know… 

Would you trust a driverless auto?