UK To Allow Driverless Cars By January 190
rtoz sends this news from the BBC: The UK government has announced that driverless cars will be allowed on public roads starting in January next year. It also invited cities to compete to host one of three trials of the tech, which would start at the same time. In addition, ministers ordered a review of the UK's road regulations to provide appropriate guidelines. ... The debate now is whether to allow cars, like the prototype unveiled by Google in May, to abandon controls including a steering wheel and pedals and rely on the vehicle's computer. Or whether, instead, to allow the machine to drive, but insist a passenger be ready to wrest back control at a moment's notice.
Re:Figures it would not be the US (Score:5, Informative)
Nevada legalized driver less cars a couple of years ago. Google will be running an autonomous taxi service in Vegas: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tec... [telegraph.co.uk]
Re:Figures it would not be the US (Score:4, Informative)
UK vs US roads (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not deploying driverless cars kills people (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia has a nice table of the relevant data [wikipedia.org]. Per capita statistics are a bit misleading as they don't count for different levels of car ownership. Per vehicle statistics are a bit better. The UK has 6.2 fatalities per 100,000 motor vehicles (per year), whereas the USA has 13.6. Generalising this to 'Europe in general' doesn't really work though: Greece, for example, has 13.8 and Portugal has 18.
Even that doesn't tell the whole story though, because people in the UK laugh hysterically when we hear how long people in the USA think a reasonable daily commute is and so cars in the USA are likely to be driven further, which might account for the difference. Taking that into account and using the numbers for fatalities per billion km driven, the UK has 4.3 and the USA 7.6 , so under twice as many. As the grandparent said: not too far behind.