Would you trust driverless cars?

A global Cybersecurity conference in Belfast has heard that driverless cars on our roads are not as far away as people think. 

Dr Madeline Cheah, cyber security innovation lead at Horiba MIRA, said that Northern Ireland is already seeing versions of connected vehicles on its roads.

She said: “We’re already seeing pre-cruisers, and automated cars with adaptive cruise control for instance.

“We’re on level two right now, and we’ll see level three in foreseeable future, which means the vehicle may be able to do everything but will need human intervention to take over at some point.

“I think there is a sufficient number of challenges for public adoption of these vehicles, but that’s the thing with every new technology, plenty of people didn’t want automatic machines during the industrial revolution,” Dr Cheah added.

“A word that came up a lot was trust and trust worthiness, at a technological level, how do we know it’s safe? How do we know it does what it says?

“At a legal level, if something is wrong, who looks into it?

“At a personal level, would you want the kids in there?

“There are two ways to achieve connectivity, one is the vehicle itself, the car would be equipped with sensors to tackle terrain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if governments began upgrading infrastructure to bring autonomous vehicles onto the roads.

“It’s hard to say when we’ll see fully automated cars on the road, the creation of this system is driven by need, its unclear what demand might be just now, in terms of human demand we don’t know yet, but this will be a really big driver.”

What do you think? Are driverless cars an innovation that will ultimately make roads safer or an unnecessary technology that will strip away the pleasure of driving? Share your views at Speakers Corner