Credit: David Ramos/Getty Images
In October 2017, I wrote about driverless cars. I speculated that their rise would one day result in a push to ban human-driven vehicles – but not without a huge political backlash. Indeed, I compared the coming struggle to the fight over gun control in America:
“Foreigners often view American attitudes to gun ownership with incredulity. They just don’t understand the passion with which the right to bear arms is defended. However, I think that they will understand when their own governments try to stop them from driving.
“Charlton Heston once declared that the government would only take his gun from his ‘cold dead hands’. In the next few decades, there will be those who clutch the steering wheel with equal determination…”
As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait long for ‘a right to drive’ movement to get off the ground.
Alex Roy is a rally driver, writer and activist. I’ve no reason to think he read my article, but at the time he too was thinking about the implications of driverless technology, albeit with rather more concern. In fact, as M. R. O’Connor tells us in the New Yorker, Roy has emerged as the leader of the human resistance:
“Roy started the Human Driving Association in early 2018, after reading a manifesto written by Robin Chase, the entrepreneur and former C.E.O. of Zipcar. In the manifesto, ‘Shared Mobility Principles for Livable Cities,’ Chase outlines a now familiar vision for autonomous driving, in which dense urban areas are filled with autonomous vehicles that operate in fleets, so as to reduce congestion and emissions… In ninety frenzied minutes, [Roy] wrote his own manifesto, which he published as an article for The Drive, an online car magazine. It begins with a picture of a steering wheel and the words ‘From my cold, dead hands,’ and culminates by calling for a constitutional amendment creating a right to drive.”
The Human Driving Association already has 10,000 members, even though there’s no immediate threat to the ‘right to drive’. Just how big could the movement get if the companies investing in driverless technology succeed in putting fully automated vehicles (AVs) on the road?
Every year, more than a million people die in traffic accidents around the world. We’ve become habituated to the slaughter. But would we be as tolerant if computerised driving systems were responsible? I doubt we’d allow robots (because that’s what driverless cars are) to kill a million people every year, or a hundred thousand for that matter. Even a death toll of 10,000 could generate hundreds of ruinous law suits. If AVs are ten or a hundred times safer than human drivers, that won’t be enough; to go mainstream they will need to be thousands of times safer.
However, if that standard is ever achieved then it will place the human right to drive under immense pressure. Every death or injury caused by human error would be seen as a completely avoidable tragedy.
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