The most expected future cars are the level 5 autonomous cars which are significantly most talked topic in the automotive industry. But it seems that fully autonomous car is not ready for the prime time. According to BMW’s special representative to the UK, Ian Robertson, fully autonomous cars may never be allowed on many public roads.
Robertson accentuated BMW’s leading role in developing fully-automatic systems and acknowledged the worst; that it might be morally incorrect to leave the decision for unavoidable accidents to a machine.
Humans have a love-hate relationship with technology. While inventions like smartphones, computers, and interactive speakers have made our lives better, they’ve also opened the door to new risks. And this goes for self-driving cars as well.
Imagine a scenario where the car has to decide between hitting one person or the other, what is it going to do? – Ian Robertson
He thinks that we should not allow machines to decide nor are they capable to decide over such situations.
Till now 40 vehicles have been tested by BMW on public roads running on 660 miles customarily. Though the majority of the trips are completed without problems, yet the engineer on board has to intervene on an average of three times for each vehicle. Robertson claims this as good but it “has to be perfect.”
While Robertson stated that he could never see a scenario where the firm made cars without steering wheels i.e BMW fully autonomous cars will never happen. The UK government is hopeful about autonomous cars and are encouraging autonomous testing even if some of its fundamentals go against the Highway Code. They know it is all about the race to take upon leadership and that opening such testing could have significant benefits.
