The age of driverless cars is here, as the UK is making plans to allow these vehicles on public streets by January of next year. This should be seen as a big win for technology, and also for road safety if it turns out that driverless cars are less inclined to cause accidents and death.
Ministers in the UK have ordered a review of road regulations to help provide the appropriate guidelines to get things up and running. We understand that the Department for Transport had originally planned for self-driving cars to be trialed on UK roads by the end of 2013, but those plans did not pan out.
The UK Treasury plans to create a £10 million fund for city and towns that are interested of being the trial ground for driverless cars.
"Today's announcement will see driverless cars take to our streets in less than six months, putting us at the forefront of this transformational technology and opening up new opportunities for our economy and society," said Business Secretary Vince Cable.
Engineers in the UK from the University of Oxford have been experimenting with driverless cars for quite some time. However, concerns about insurance and legal issues have halted plans to put driverless cars on the roads. As it stands right now, it appears those legal and insurance issues seem to have died down, for the moment at least.
While the UK has been slow to adopt driverless cars, other countries have been forging ahead. Japan has done its first public test of driverless cars with the help of Nissan back in 2013, and U.S. in States of California, Nevada and Florida have all approved public testing.
Google's driverless cars have so far done over 300,000 miles on the open roads of California.
Excited passengers shouldn't get too excited just yet of the prospects of a driverless car carrying them to the movies and back. According to the FBI, driverless cars could be more dangerous than cars driven completely by humans.
There is some truth to what the FBI is saying, though we believe it will depend on how reliable GPS and mapping services are. We wouldn't want to hear about a driverless car with a family of six ending up in the desert when it should have been in New York.
