UK Government Releases Rules To Get Self-Driving Cars Onto Public Roads

rippeltippel writes: Ars Technica UK reports that the UK government has released the rules to get self-driving cars onto public roads. As the article reports, drivers will be required to have "a high level of knowledge about the technology used" (i.e. they'll be techies) and — most notably — will have to mimic the act of driving, to avoid confusing other drivers. The original PDF can be viewed here.

Comments

Re:mimic the act of driving

[gstoddart]

Exactly. Self cars need to be 100% self driving, or they're utterly useless.

You can't have a failure mode where it says "OK, meat sock, I have no idea what to do, it's your turn and you have 0.7 seconds to react". That will simply not work.

That would be idiotic and dangerous, and mean that self-driving cars are mostly here but have huge gaps in what they can do.

But it should be like a cab, with the passengers being exactly that ... passengers.

To me, a self-driving car remains a proof of concept if there is ever a mode in which the user needs to take over, the user even has control they could use, or if the user pays for liability insurance as a "driver".

If Google wants to have self-driving cars, they should be like taxi cabs, and they should have their own liability. This hybrid model is doomed to fail.