“Perceptions,” by Gerry Warner

Are you looking forward to the day when you jump into your driverless vehicle and settle down to watch a movie, read a book or have a nap on your way to Vancouver? Well you better look again because it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

No kidding.

Despite the billions being spent by Google, Apple, Tesla and others, the pie in the sky concept of driverless vehicles is the biggest fantasy – I would call it a hoax – being foisted on the gullible public by Silicon Valley geeks with software for brains and cynical companies with money to burn.

Go ahead. Don’t believe me. But maybe you’ll believe a recent article in Forbes Magazine that pointed out a lot of home truths about driverless vehicles in the wake of the first driverless vehicle fatality that took place last year with surprisingly little publicity. The May 7, 2016 crash killed a 40-year-old Ohio man whose 2015 Tesla Model S’s semi-autonomous auto-pilot failed to detect the white side of a semi-trailer crossing in front of it against a bright sky and crashed into the big rig when the auto-pilot failed to apply the brakes. A DVD was found in the dead man’s vehicle, leading to speculation that he was watching a movie at the time of the collision.

So much for supposedly “errorless” machines. If a driver had been behind the wheel he might still be alive today.

So, if fatalities can occur in semi-autonomous auto-pilot mode, what’s likely to happen in driverless mode when robot technology takes over? Chaos and death say many experts. The technology simply isn’t good enough and won’t be for at least another 20 years, says futurist and innovation adviser Chunka Mui in another Forbes article.

“Even if driverless cars can learn to interact with human-driven cars, human drivers will not be able to deal with driverless cars. The resulting confusion would lead to more accidents and congestion rather than less,” he says. Software in driverless vehicles can also be hacked by people outside the vehicle including criminals and terrorists. “Risks range from invasion of privacy to the specter of driverless cars being used as a precision bomb delivery vehicle” says Mui.

Weather and road conditions are another critical safety factor for driverless vehicles. The beam from the auto-sensor on top of driverless vehicles relies heavily on traffic lanes painted on the road’s surface. But what happens when these lanes fade with age or are obscured by road conditions such as potholes and road repairs? What about rainy nights when the lanes dissolve into a pool of reflections? Or driving in a heavy fog? And what about places like Cranbrook – and many others – where painted road lanes can be covered by snow for weeks at a time? What about dirt roads or the many side streets in small towns like ours that don’t have painted lanes? The questions are endless and driverless safety claims dubious at best.

And how do you program a driverless vehicle to swerve to the roadside to miss a deer? Does it swerve into the opposite lane and hit another vehicle? Does it drive directly into Bambi or swerve the other way into a rock bluff or maybe a telephone pole? Technology is blind. Human judgment isn’t.

And when there’s accidents involving driverless vehicles – and there surely will be – who gets sued? What about the millions of jobs that will disappear in the trucking and transportation industries if driverless vehicles take over? And if vehicles are going to drive themselves, who cares if you own a Chev, Toyota, Ford or a Chrysler? There go millions of jobs in the auto industry to be replaced by computer vehicles. And what do computers often do? They crash!

A world like this would be a doomsday scenario and I don’t believe it’s going to happen. Human nature being what it is, I think most of us would rather consign our driving fate to our own hands instead of trusting a silicon chip in a robot machine. Battery-powered vehicles with a driver behind the wheel are the wave of the future. Not driverless cars, which would be killing machines.

– Gerry Warner is a retired journalist and a driver who likes to make his own driving decisions.

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