Who's in control?

THE TECHNICAL CHALLENGES OF FULL AUTONOMY ARE VAST. BUT THE ISSUES OF ETHICS AND ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY ARE ARGUABLY EVEN MORE COMPLEX

- ANGUS MACKENZIE

LAS VEGAS, January 2009: The Audi A6 Avant cruises at 70km/h through the heavy traffic heading south on Interstate 15. The Audi engineer next to me sits behind the wheel, hands on his legs and feet off the pedals. The A6 is driving itself, automatically adjusting to the ebb and flow of the traffic, changing lanes as the engineer taps the indicator stalk.

Audi calls the system Piloted Driving and says the technology will be available on a production Audi in five years’ time. Piloted Driving, says Bjorn Giesler, one of the engineers developing the system, is designed to allow drivers to let the car do the boring stuff. “Our cars will always be for people who like to drive and like performance. But driving in a traffic jam is not fun and not interesting. So, we offer the opportunity for the driver to let the car do this for them.”

New York, March 2018: Autonomous vehicle specialist Waymo, which began life as Google’s self-driving car project in 2009, announces it is buying 20,000 Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles as part of the company’s plan to launch a fully autonomous commercial ride-hailing service – in other words, taxis without human drivers – in 2020. Waymo and Jaguar Land Rover engineers will work in tandem to build these robo-taxis to be self-driving from the start, rather than retrofitting them after they come off the assembly line.

“We’re not a car company,” John Krafcik told me when he was CEO of Waymo. “We’re not making cars. We don’t have to worry about monthly sales figures, we don’t have to worry about the facilities required to tool new vehicle architectures. We’re focused on building the driver. That’s all we’re focused on. We want to build the world’s safest, most experienced driver.”