Self-driving cars’ forum generates 15 questions

An online forum which ran here last week (4 Feb) generated 15 questions on a wide range of topics relating to self-driving cars. All of the questions and answers are available to read with no need to login etc.

The forum, titled ‘Are we are ready for the self-driving car?’, was hosted by Tyron Louw from the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds.

Autonomous vehicles are a hot topic as the prospect of the technology being rolled out to the mass market becomes more of a reality.

Last Friday (29 January) the first autonomous vehicles to be tested on the streets of London were unveiled while in October an £11m research programme was launched to help further the development of fully autonomous cars capable of operating safely on the UK’s roads.

Questions already submitted for the forum cover a range of issues including safety and reliability of the technology, the threat of vehicles being ‘hacked’, where the responsibility lies in the event of a crash, and the point at which we likely to see self-driving cars on UK roads.

Tyron Louw‘s main research area is in driver behaviour and his PhD research focuses on the human factors of highly automated driving. He is specifically interested in how to safely re-engage the driver in manual driving.

He is also a research assistant on the EU funded projects CityMobil2 and AdaptIVe, where he investigates road users’ interactions with automated road transport systems and tries to understand how drivers can safely interact with automated vehicles.

He has helped author a number of publications on the subject and delivered a presentation at the 2014 National Road Safety Conference.