How would driverless cars affect roads?
According to chancellor Philip Hammond, driverless cars will be on our roads by 2021.
On the one hand, this may not seem like such a huge prediction, given that they are already on the road in the U.S. so it is likely to be only a matter of time (and probably not a great deal of time) before they are on the roads over here. On the other hand, as the U.S. is steadily discovering, driverless cars have all kinds of implications which standard cars do not.
The switch to driverless cars assumes the switch to electric vehicles
Although both petrol and diesel vehicles can (and indeed do) have a certain level of self-driving capability, such as assisted parking, it is hard to see how they could be made full autonomous. The reason for this is that in order for a vehicle to be able to operate without any form of human intervention at all, it would need to be aware of its power levels and be able to take action as appropriate, whether that’s something as simple as changing speed and/or gear to minimise power consumption or flagging up when it needs to be charged or even, arguably ideally, managing its own charging.
The question of power
While the smart age has brought many benefits, it has also brought more than a few challenges and cord clutter has become one of the banes of modern life, even though the EU has been trying to deal with it for about 10 years, for example in 2009 it pressurised mobile phone manufacturers into signing a memorandum of understanding in which they agreed to adopt micro-USB as the standard for chargers instead of using their own individual chargers. Apple, of course, interpreted this rather creatively (they stuck with their own proprietary charging ports but produced adapters for their chargers to make them USB compatible), and in any case the memorandum on applied to mobile phones, not to all electronic devices with the result that many consumers still wound up with countless chargers in their homes. The pain of cord clutter has become much more than an internet meme, it has become a serious issue, which manufacturers are taking serious steps to tackle with some success, for example, the use of wireless charging to limit the number of devices which need to be plugged into a socket and therefore the number of cords in use. Making the switch to electric vehicles will mean a whole new set of devices to charge and hence bring about a whole new set of challenges.
A new kind of vehicle needs a new kind of infrastructure
Issues with charging have been a fairly significant barrier to the adoption of electric vehicles even in cities. The harsh reality is that even if a purchaser mainly wants a car for use within a city, they may have an occasional need, or want, to escape to the greater countryside and not be happy about taking the risk of being caught short on power. This means that if electric vehicles are to make it into the mainstream, there will need to be a massive expansion of the charging infrastructure and this could open up some exciting opportunities to get really creative, for example, developing car parks which offer charging as an optional add-on, so you can just plug in your vehicle, go off to do whatever you want to do, and come back to find your battery replenished. In fact, ideally, wireless charging for electric cars would be the way forward, so that vehicles could really be completely autonomous and manage their own charging.
