I recently jumped in a car with a couple of other people near Kings Cross station. It was a pretty normal journey. We watched the world go by, chatted, got stuck in a bit of traffic. The journey was completely ordinary except for one thing: the car was driving itself. That twenty-minute journey represents the future of what our roads could look like.
It was exciting to know that these futuristic vehicles are in fact much closer than we anticipated and could be part of the solution to a problem we are facing right now: the death or serious injury of 30,000 people on our roads each year.
Since becoming an MP I’ve met too many families in my constituency who have lost loved ones through other people’s dangerous driving. I’m fascinated by how automation and technology could help us eradicate road danger and death.
If you speak to police they will tell you that most deadly crashes are caused by what they call the ‘fatal five’: speeding, drink or drug driving, antisocial driving, mobile phone use or not wearing a seatbelt.
You don’t need to be a machine learning expert to realise that automated vehicles trained by safe, expert drivers and programmed to comply with the strict rules of the road, could avoid all of those five and the needless death they cause. A self-driving car is not going to get drunk or high or be scrolling through TikTok, for example.
Some critics say that these cars can’t handle our higgedly piggeldy streets and roundabouts as they are made for American grid cities. I can confirm the Wayve autonomous car handled the roundabouts with ease. We did have a safety driver sat ready to take the wheel if any issues arose, but none did. Wayve is a British start up at the forefront of autonomous technology – they want to bring economic benefits as well as advanced road safety to Britain.
During the passage of the Automated Vehicles Act in 2024 the last government rightly put safety at the heart of the regulation, stating that a self-driving vehicle should be at least as safe as a ‘competent and careful’ driver. There are still questions about what exactly this means.
In the US, where the rollout of AVs and ‘robotaxis’ is far ahead of here, the safety statistics of automated versus human driven vehicles look impressive. Waymo – the Google owned company who run self-driving taxis there, and trials of which have recently been announced on London streets later this year – claim their vehicles have 80% fewer injury-causing crashes compared with an average human driver.
Within the ‘human average’ there will be drivers that are neither careful nor competent, so the figures are hard to compare. But proving the reliability and safety of automated vehicles is essential for public acceptance of this new technology. They’ve also got to prove they are safe from cyber-attacks and will share the necessary data in the event of a collision.
I know that many professional drivers are worried about job losses because of self-driving vehicles. There are many in my area who feel this. But given that the full vehicle automation revolution is still a distant prospect, I hope that these baby steps we are taking into automated vehicles in Britain is not seen as a threat. People who drive for a living do much more than an automated vehicle could ever do – whether it’s supporting vulnerable passengers, protecting freight as an HGV driver, or managing antisocial behaviour on bus services.
Britain always been a world leader in the car industry, and it’s clear the future of this industry is in electrification and automation, and we need to be part of that.
As with any new technology, there are risks that must be managed. But the safety benefits of automated vehicles could be huge. This is one area of roads policy we cannot afford to take the back seat on.
Why driverless cars could be the answer to our road safety crisis
