Forget all the safety benefits of self-driving cars – the biggest boon for drivers is likely to be they will no longer have to bother with car insurance. Several multinational firms are testing electric driverless cars that can be hailed from a smartphone. They include Google, Volvo and Mercedes.
Each company has their technology at different stages of development.
Google has already tried and tested their system over a small grid of roads for the past two years or so and is ready to unleash a fleet of 250 vehicles for testing on public roads in California, USA.
Google argues that paying to ride a driverless car makes good financial sense because cars are idle for 96% of the time – and amazingly 50% of city traffic is drivers touring around looking for a parking space.
“Driverless cars means having access to a network when and where you want a car without all the hassle of ownership,” said a Google spokesman.
But more importantly, the Association of British Insurers (ABI), the trade body for car insurance firms in the UK, reckons anyone riding in a driverless car will not need to take out cover.
“It’s like riding in a taxi or an aircraft,” said an ABI spokesman. “If these have an accident, unless the passenger is directly to blame, it’s the person who controls the mode of transport who has to take out insurance and their insurer settles any claim.”
To keep the risk of an accident to a minimum, Google driverless cars have 17 all-round sensors that build a 3-D picture of what’s going on around the car for a distance of 200 metres.
They also have fail-safes that stop the car pulling into blind-spots, overshooting traffic signals and keep the vehicle away from other vehicles or pedestrians acting erratically on the road.
The bad news is Google expects driverless car availability to be limited to big cities – much like the Boris Bikes in London.