My smart car scare – and why I’ll never set foot in a robotaxi

Why would anyone ever get into a “robotaxi”? In London it’s soon going to be a live question, because Waymo, a company owned by Alphabet, parent of Google, has been given permission to conduct trials of driverless taxis in the capital.

If things go smoothly – never a given in pothole-bedecked Broken Britain – the experiment will go nationwide, become normalised, and the honourable profession of taxi driving will become a thing of the past.

I have qualms about being propelled in a metal box on wheels at speed with no human being in charge (though the early London pilot scheme will have a “safety human” on board, relegated to the role of an emergency assistant). I won’t do it. Who do you blame if it goes wrong, assuming you’re still around to ask questions? It’s seldom that we entrust our personal physical safety to a machine to the point of letting it weave in and out of traffic and honk at cyclists. Even if the statistics suggest the so-called robotaxi has a lower accident rate than its human equivalent, it’s still a considerable act of faith.

Have you actually been driven in a car that can think for itself? I’m still getting over driving a ‘smart’ Chinese-made SUV which slammed the brakes in every time I passed an articulated lorry on the motorway, because it thought I was about to run into it. Had someone behind me been driving too close and driven into the back of me, I might well have ended up under the wheels of a Royal Mail truck. Positively dangerous.

I’ve also found the way they interpret speed limits to be a bit scatty, as when a fast road runs close to a suburban street and it thinks you should be doing 20mph not 70mph. That sort of thing. The technology as it stands is eye-popping, but clearly not flawless.

I’m not a total luddite. You may well have a limited version of this technology in your own car – “ADAS” – advanced driver assistance systems, and your sat nav. It doesn’t take that much effort to join all those up. Then your vehicle can take you to where you need to go, and, on the evidence of the trials so far, reasonably safely. (Probably the only thing they haven’t quite cracked is the manual process of refuelling or recharging).

Even now, if you’ve got a smart enough model you can set a speed and the car will speed up and slow down of its own accord, shuffle along in traffic jams automatically, keep in lane and read and obey speed limits. A Chinese car equipped with LiDAR – “Light Detection and Ranging” – learns how to drive much like how a human toddler learns how to make its way around a room or a garden, and how to tackle stairs. On the dash you can see how it “sees” the world trying to distinguish parked cars from ones merely waiting, or pedestrians from trees. Fascinating stuff.

But trust one to drive me around? Not likely. Then again, humans aren’t so flawless, and I’ve had enough points in my licence and knocks in my time to imbue me with some humility. The robotaxi does have a certain inevitable feel about it, and so the AV – autonomous vehicle – will certainly make professional driving and maybe even personal motoring a thing of the past. For me, someone who has just spent a day driving new and classic old Bentleys around Cheshire, that would be the more grievous loss, even if the latest ones virtually drive themselves. Who wants to give up control?