The Long Road to a Driverless Future

The Long Road to a Driverless Future - 05.10.16

Living with Robots is a fascinating five-part video series from the Financial Times that explores the relationship between man and machine. In this segment, The Long Road to a Driverless Future, Tim Bradshaw visits the biggest developers of driverless cars to find out what issues manufacturers face in making self-driving cars safe and accepted by the public.

The journey begins in Mountain View, home of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project, where Tim takes a back-seat to artificial intelligence in one of Google’s autonomous vehicles. This preview of the future is not exactly picture-perfect, as we find a Google engineer sitting behind the wheel, ready to come to the aid of AI, should the need arise. This is the first sign that a driverless future may not be right around the corner.

Self-driving cars have logged millions of driverless miles. However, even if autonomous cars were ‘smart’ enough and tested well enough to take to the highway, there are still many challenges to integrating them with the public. Will self-driving cars take complete control of the vehicle or does the driver need to be alert and ready to take over? Who is liable if an autonomous car causes an accident? Tim Bradshaw investigates these and many of the issues that confront self-driving cars, with answers from some of the leading engineers in the industry.