This is a driverless vehicle. In the wild, amongst the public, with no backup driver.
This is the Transport Research Laboratory's Meridian Shuttle. It doesn't look like a sports
car, but that's not the point: it doesn't have to.
Now, new Tesla vehicles can have 'autopilot' which is very shiny, but isn't that different
from the lane-assist systems we've had for a few years. They can't drive on their own.
Google's autonomous cars sound great, but they won't work in snow and heavy rain yet,
and they require a driver that's alert and ready to take over just in case. This vehicle:
you tap a button on a touchscreen, and it genuinely drives itself, without a backup
driver behind the wheel. It doesn't even have a wheel.
This is only a trial -- but for a vehicle that's among real pedestrians, it's got a
surprising amount of speed to it.
So let's go back 150 years. The Locomotive Act 1865 limited all horseless carriages to
4mph -- 2mph in cities -- and required them to have a man walking in front with a red
flag to warn people who might pass by. It sounds ridiculous, but remember: they were
still 50 years away from the Model T Ford -- these were steam powered vehicles, all
coal and soot. They were new, they were scary, and there was a risk they'd fail catastrophically.
That's kind of where we are with driverless vehicles. They're a little clunky, they're
a little slow, and there's a lot less risk of catastrophic failure without a steam boiler
-- but they're still a curiosity.
Over the century that followed the Locomotive Act, we learned what the risks of cars were,
and we learned to accept a lot of them: worldwide, more than a million people a year die on the
roads, and we accept that risk because we're used to it, and because the alternative means
our world doesn't work any more. In fifty years, a descendent of this shuttle might
be whisking people around at much higher speeds, and in safety. Maybe we'll look back at this
early step and think, wait, really, they didn't even allow them on public roads? They had
to have large flourescent markings on them, just in case they scared people? How quaint.
And then we'll tell our cars to take us home, and we won't think any more about it.
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