DVLA Over 70 Eye Tests

[Valvebloke]

The driveless landers to Titan and Mars do not have any traffic to contend with.    They also creep along at a very slow rate.       Lets assume your driveless vehicles are all proceeding along the motorway at a steady 70mph, separated from each other by 25 feet.     Everything is fine and dandy, then one has a blow out.       In the twinkling of an eye, you have hundreds of vehicles smashing together at 70 mph! .

Once the bulk of the traffic is under driverless control it won't need to be 'contended with'. I'm afraid that regarding the roads as a place to practice contention is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Absolute speed is immaterial, it's relative speed that matters (although if you want to get into the details Cassini/Huygens reached speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour - if that's 'a very slow rate' then you and I are driving at very different speeds  ).

Your argument about wheel failure is proof that trains will never work. But they do. I once collected my aged parents from Heathrow and was driving home at the same speed as everyone else on the M4 (more than 70, I have to admit) when just east of J6 the front offside tyre of my Renault 25 suddenly deflated. The ride became unusually bumpy and a noise like a low-flying helicopter made me look up into the sky for a moment before I realised what had happened. I checked my mirrors, signalled left, pulled onto the hard shoulder, changed the wheel and continued home. The people who've looked at the stats reckon that if we could eliminate all of the accidents caused by driver error at the cost of accepting more accidents arising from acts of God (suspension collapses, deer running into the traffic, meteorite impact etc) we'd have fewer dead people, not more.

We have an ageing population. I'm afraid our faculties (mine included) deteriorate as we get older. Plenty of us eventually have to hand our licences back. Rather than tying folks down to public transport or to just not travelling, giving them the option of a driverless vehicle seems like a no-brainer. Not to mention the over-tired, the drunk, the inattentive, those hooked to their phones, all of whom are sharing the road with us at the moment.

It'll take a while, and there will be issues requiring changes to vehicle design, vehicle usage, road layout etc but if I was 20 years younger I'd wager a tidy sum that by 2050 almost all of the vehicles on Britain's trunk roads will be driverless.

VB