Driving will be illegal by 2050, says new study

Market research company predicts driving a car on the road will be outlawed within three decades

Humans will be outlawed from driving cars on public roads by 2050, according to a new study by IDTechEx.

In a report released this week called Autonomous Cars, Robotaxis & Sensors 2022-2042, the market research firm says autonomous vehicles (AVs) will “match or exceed human safety” by 2024 and that self-driving cars will be capable of fulfilling the world’s mobility needs without a single collision by the 2040s.

So why should humans be allowed to continue driving when AVs connected via 5G and V2X (vehicle-to-infrastructure) tech are able to receive more information about their surroundings than human drivers could ever see or process, asks IDTechEx.

Unlike humans, driverless cars don’t get distracted by mobile phones, fatigue, alcohol, passengers, spiders hiding behind sun visors, the need to play boy racer on the way to the shops or other human failings that are claimed to cause 90 per cent of vehicle collisions.

And IDTechEx says there’s a good reason that computers are already so ingrained into many other aspects of our everyday life.

“They can deal with more data than we can, they process it faster, and they do not make mistakes,” it says, before conceding the elephants in the room: legislation and public confidence.

“The difficulty, of course, is certifying that given the responsibility of driving, the last of these advantages is maintained and that the public has confidence in the technology.”

That confidence may take some time to build, with 53 per cent of drivers in a recent study saying they’d feel less safe driving on roads alongside self-driving trucks.

Indeed, given the well-publicised accidents involving Tesla drivers relying too heavily on Autopilot – the subject of ongoing investigations by regulatory authorities including the US NHTSA – and the most recent AV mishap at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, it could take a very long time.

“One trend identified is with vehicle safety certifiers mandating higher levels of automated safety, and the inclusion of sensors such as radar,” said IDTechEx.

“An example is Tesla losing its top safety rating from the NHTSA when they removed radar from the Model 3 and Model Y in May, which ironically, improves the system, according to Tesla.”

But IDTechEx asserts that once AVs are proven to save lives, governments may be deemed criminally negligent for not mandating them.

“Imagine being pulled over by the police with a car full of people not wearing seat belts, [and] the police officer says, ‘if you crashed, you could have killed someone’. Now the same scene but instead of not wearing seatbelts you are operating a vehicle manually in an autonomous-only town center.

“The assumption is that the technology will save lives and not using it is criminally negligent. Would this progression be so unusual?

“Technology has always caused changes to the laws on how we operate vehicles; as vehicles became faster, speed limits were introduced. When mobile phones emerged their use in vehicles had to be outlawed; as autonomous drivers outperform humans will we be banned from driving altogether?”

Level 3 AV technology has been ready since 2017 but car-makers have been prevented from implementing hands/eyes-off driving functionality in most countries due to legislation, which continues to struggle with questions including liability in the event of an accident.

But Japan, Germany and the UK will allow Level 3 vehicles on public roads by the end of 2021 and IDTechEx expects “significant adoption of level 3 and level 4 technology within the car market over the next 10-20 years, radicalising the way society travels and causing huge disruption to the auto sector's century old business models”.

IDTechEx admits that full (Level 4 or 5) vehicle autonomy remains in its infancy as it undergoes intensive on-road trials, but insists that 2023 will be the start of the AV revolution due to rapid advances in AV tech such as solid-state LiDAR, mechanically rotating LiDAR, radar, imaging radar, cameras, short wave infrared (SWIR) thermal cameras and more.

“Honda and Mercedes are the leaders here, with Honda releasing a Level 3 vehicle into the Japanese market and Mercedes preparing a Level 3 release in Autumn 2021,” said the report.

“GM and Tesla are close behind with Level 3 cars in waiting (technically ready but held back by regulations). In China Arcfox and Xpeng are pushing for Level 3 to Level 4 vehicles, but are again held back by regulations.

IDTechEx expects a 46 per cent increase in AV growth by about 2040 based on the timing of trials and expansion plans of key existing AV players and mobility start-ups including Waymo, Cruise, Baidu and AutoX.

“Given the current state of trials and existing plans for further expansion from key players, IDTechEx believes 2023 will be the start of the AV revolution,” said the report.

“IDTechEx expects that the trials will grow within their existing cities and then spread from city to city much in the same way as ride-hailing platforms (Uber, Lyft, Didi etc.) over the past decade.”

IDTechEx analysed ‘autonomous disengagement’ – when an AV hands control back its human back-up driver for any reason – from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), which it says reveals the maturity of current autonomous testing.

“The top players such as Waymo and Cruise are currently traveling ~30,000 miles between disengagements, a number increasing by a factor of 2 each year,” said IDTechEx.

“If this growth is sustained, by 2046 autonomous vehicles will meet the total mobility demand of the US (3 trillion miles) without a disengagement. By 2050, they could meet the world’s transportation needs with fewer than 1 collision per year.

“Should humans be allowed to continue driving when we cause millions of injuries and hundreds of thousands of fatalities in car crashes each year? No, driving will be outlawed.”

IDTechEx says the most significant growth in AV tech around the world will be in Europe, the US and China.

The report suggests clean-air zones already established in major cities around the world could become AV-only areas that could then be expanded across larger urban centres, potentially making even suburban travel legal only in driverless vehicles.

“As the maturity of autonomy increases it is conceivable that these zones could become autonomous-only, to improve inner-city pedestrian safety, then rolled out to entire cities, mandating that travel inside the city may only be conducted by autonomous drivers,” says IDTechEx.

“Eventually, manual driving could become completely illegal on public roads in the interest of safety. This is not to say that manual driving will completely disappear but may be relegated to a sport, reserved for racing and track days.”

Driving will be illegal by 2050, says new study

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