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Charlotte Haye 28th September 2016

Driverless Lorries In The UK – Perfect Or Problem?

There has been a lot of debate over the last year or so over the driverless car, and whether or not this revolutionary technology is a major leap forward or an accident waiting to happen. The progress of the driverless technology has been closely monitored, and Google is even assisting in the design of regulations for such vehicles in the public. But in March this year George Osbourne announced that driverless lorries were to be trialled in the UK, so we wanted to take a look at the pros and cons of driverless vehicles on our roads.

Rewards

There are a lot of good points for the progression of the driverless car in the UK. Not least is the sheer amount of time it could save commuters. The average driver in England spends 235 hours a year just driving – the equivalent to 6 working weeks. With a driverless car, you can hand over the control and use that time productively. It will also make our roads safer, as driverless cars are pre-programmed to follow speed limits, pull over for emergency vehicles and avoid collisions. In fact, it’s predicted that if 90% of cars on the road were autonomous, the number of road accidents would fall from 6 million a year to 1.3 million, and deaths would fall from 33,000 to 11,300.

For lorries, it’s a slightly different story. Trials of the driverless lorry in Germany praised the driverless lorry for its safety over human drivers, stating that ‘it never gets tired, it never loses concentration or focus. No matter how well you accelerate, slow down or steer a truck you can never do it as good as the highway pilot can’. Predictions indicate that self driving lorries could make our roads much safer, cutting down some of the 3000 annual truck accident deaths and lowering pollution while speeding up deliveries.

Risks

Of course, not having a driver behind the wheel of a car comes with some significant risks – let alone a lorry. Single the launch of driverless cars for ‘testing’ purposes there have been many teething problems, usually manifesting in scrapes and dings to the car. In late 2015, motorists were actually making a point of slamming into driverless cars in order to expose a key flaw in their design – they follow the law all the time, which human drivers do not. This resulted in the ‘cautious’ driverless cars being driven into by human motorists who aren’t expecting it. There have even been incidents of a driverless car being pulled over by police for going 24mph in a 35mph limit and causing traffic backups. There have been many studies done into the accident rates of driverless cars using naturalistic data, but the technology still ploughs on. However, this year the progress of the driverless car took a big hit. In May 2016 the first casualty of a self-driving car was reported. Josh Brown (40) was travelling in a Tesla S model in ‘autopilot’ mode when the sensor software failed to distinguish between the sky and a white lorry, sending the car hurtling into the lorry at full speed. The car went under the lorry and the top was ripped off, killing Josh. This accident has the entire industry questioning what this fatal crash could mean for the path of driverless cars.

There are of course other alternatives being discussed to improve road safety and reduce the accident rate, particularly where HGV’s are concerned. For example, Samsung is currently piloting an idea to put video walls on the back of HGV’s to broadcast lane traffic around the vehicle, but for the most part, we are still a long way off. We’d love to hear your opinions in the comments section, or get in touch to find out more about HGV road safety and the possibility of driverless lorries in the UK.