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Researchers all over Stanford are working on our driverless future. From exploring complex ethics questions, to developing leading-edge technologies, to real-world testing of custom autonomous cars, Stanford researchers are striving to help ensure the safety of driverless vehicles.

Slowly rolling out onto city streets, self-driving cars are testing their driving chops in Silicon Valley, Helsinki, London and a few dozen other isolated locations around the globe - and the expectation is that their numbers will only swell.

With those eerily empty cars come questions about everything from traffic patterns (will we still need stop lights if cars can communicate?) to insurance (who pays for an autonomous car's accident?).

And then there's the question of safety.

"Computers don't get drunk," said Stephen Zoepf, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). "There are a sweeping group of accidents that will go away." But we still don't know the kinds of mistakes autonomous cars will make instead.

It's these kinds of questions - and the mechanics, algorithms and policies that go with them - that need to be resolved before humans can completely kick their respective feet up on the dashboard and zone out.

Zoepf and Chris Gerdes, who directs both CARS and the Revs program at Stanford, have said we're about 90 percent of the way to our driverless future. It's the remaining 10 percent that teams of Stanford faculty and students from across engineering, psychology and law are working to address.

Johannes Himmelreich writes for The Conversation about the kinds of everyday situations that pose ethical challenges for self-driving cars.

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Autonomous car research at Stanford | Stanford News

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Researchers all over Stanford are working on our driverless future. From exploring complex ethics questions, to developing leading-edge technologies, to real-world testing of custom autonomous cars, Stanford researchers are striving to help ensure the safety of driverless vehicles.

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The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars - Patrick Lin

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The Overlooked Secret Behind Driverless Cars | Priscilla Nagashima Boyd | TEDxOxford

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Humans are terrible at driving. The US Department of Transport estimates that 94% of crashes are due to the driver.

We drive too fast. We get distracted. We make poor decisions.

If history is anything to go by, more than 1,000 people are likely to die on Australian roads in the next year. Each death is a tragedy for the families and friends of those killed.

And it's also a big drain on our economy. Each fatal accident costs around $2 million. The total cost on our economy from all car accidents is more than $17 billion per year.

Autonomous cars are going to be far better drivers. There is therefore a moral imperative to get them onto our roads as soon as possible.

They will also bring many other benefits such as reducing congestion, lowering transport costs and bringing personal mobility to the elderly, disabled and young.

Tesla, more than any car company, has been pushing the field. Its technology is impressive and improving rapidly.

Accidents

Accidents are, however, happening at an increasing rate as autonomous cars become more common.

On Valentine's Day this year, one of Google's autonomous cars caused its first crash when it pulled out in front of a bus. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

Just three months later, on May 7, a Tesla S driving autonomously on a 65mph (about 105kmh) limit road drove into a truck turning across the highway. The driver, Joshua Brown, who was sitting in the driving seat of the Tesla was killed. According to reports, he was watching a Harry Potter movie.

What actually happened in the lead up to the accident is currently under investigation.

Tesla issued a statement, acknowledging the tragic loss, and saying their instructions require drivers who engage the autopilot mode to monitor the road and be ready to take back control at short notice.

And last Sunday in the US, a second Tesla car crashed while being used autonomously. No one was injured. But how long before a Tesla car kills an innocent member of the public, a pedestrian or person in another vehicle?

Public safety

Silicon Valley's "fail fast" culture may work for Facebook. No one is likely to be seriously hurt when their news feed is messed up. But fail fast is too risky for public safety.

Is it responsible for Tesla to release this technology into the wild when serious questions surround its safety?

Will the human driver monitor the road adequately? Will a human driver be able to take back control quickly enough?

It is not sufficient that the human driver gave consent; the rest of us using the roads have not given our consent.

Since human lives are at stake, drug companies do not get to test their new products on the general population. Should car companies be allowed to do so?

Tesla plans to put out a blog post to educate Tesla owners on how to use the autonomous features of their cars safely. I doubt this is enough.

The US Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has defined five different levels of autonomous driving, ranging from zero to four (level zero is where the driver remains in control at all times).

Should level three autonomy be allowed where a human driver may be required to take back control at any moment? Or should we only allow level four where the system will work safely even if the human driver fails to take back control promptly.

Should Tesla be allowed to push updates out without extensive testing?

On average, one person dies for every 100 million miles (160 million kilometres) driven. According to Tesla, this was the first fatality in 130 million miles (210 million kilometres) of use of its autopilot software driving autonomously.

This would suggest that Tesla's autonomy is about the level of a human driver. This is probably not good enough to be giving it control. Remember that humans are still having to take over when the driving gets more difficult. I would want autonomous cars to be much safer before we give them control.

Safety review

Regulatory authorities are waking up to these concerns. StaySafe, the joint standing committee of the NSW parliament focused on road safety, is in the middle of an inquiry into driverless vehicles and road safety.

We need to act swiftly to update the rules and the regulatory environment. For instance, none of the legislation introduced to permit driverless cars onto the roads of California, Nevada, South Australia and elsewhere require autonomous cars to be distinguishable from human-driven cars.

In my testimony to the StaySafe committee, I argued that we need to put special plates on such cars or even a magenta flashing light.

A friend who owns a Tesla told me of a situation they encountered recently where this was needed.

The driver of a car in a lane being merged expected his Tesla to speed up or slow down to create a suitable gap. But Tesla's software is not programmed for courtesy. It continued to drive at a constant speed. My friend had to take back control to prevent a high speed collision.

When we started to build aeroplanes 100 years ago, anything went. But we quickly constructed a strong regulatory framework to ensure public safety. We need to build similar safeguards into the emerging industry for driverless cars.

Until this has happened, we need to question whether Tesla's autopilot should be allowed on our roads.

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Should Tesla's autopilot cars be allowed on public roads following accidents?

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Humans are terrible at driving. The US Department of Transport estimates that 94% of crashes are due to the driver. We drive too fast. We get distracted. We make poor decisions. If history is anything to go by, more than 1,000 people are likely to die on Australian roads in the next year.

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Who's driving? PA Images

It's not easy being a rail passenger in Britain. In recent months, London and south-east England have regularly ground to a halt in a series of rail and Underground strikes, disrupting the lives of millions.

A newspaper headline even claimed that the situation was so dire that commuters might be hired by one firm - Southern Rail - to drive the trains themselves. Recent reports suggest that some kind of resolution may soon be in sight in that dispute, but as technology advances apace, do transport networks really need staff at all?

With a self-driving bus, the Navya, arriving on the streets Las Vegas, the first in the US to operate on a public road, we may be approaching a future in which public transport networks could be run, efficiently, by machines. Indeed, London's Docklands Light Railway (DLR) network has been operating as a driverless service since 1987 - and 99% of services leave on time.

There rages, however, an embittered debate about how comfortable people may feel entrusting themselves to an automated decision maker. It seems to represent a new, psychological frontier of a kind we have never before encountered.

Whenever machinery is introduced to complete tasks traditionally done by humans, both public and professionals are often sceptical - especially when those machines can make decisions on our behalf. But while decision-making machines used to be little more than a theoretical issue, a philosophical debate even, we now have the technology to make them a fact of life.

There are vehicles lurking in corporate R&D hangars whose decision-making abilities on the go are superior to our own, and they are being tested by brands such as Tesla, Volvo, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus, Audi, and Rolls-Royce.

A new age

So what is stopping their wider introduction? The key term used by innovation management experts for how ready a society is for change is " Absorptive Capacity ". This can be likened to the ability of a sponge to absorb liquid, or, in our case, a society to absorb innovation. This absorptive capacity can be influenced by factors such as people's knowledge and experience of the subject at hand; if there is little of both in society, then that society is likely to react coolly to a proposed innovation.

In other words, if we don't know enough about how something works we are less likely to embrace it. And how do we get to understand new things if their makers are tight-lipped about how they work? This is one of the biggest obstacles facing the implementation of a far-reaching driverless transport network.

Accidents involving new technology don't help in the trustworthiness stakes - as the recent crash of a Tesla car in autopilot mode demonstrated. The accident caused people to question the safety of self-driving vehicles, even though they are far safer than human drivers, who cause 94% of accidents in the US. Indeed, human error accounts for far more accidents than mechanical failure.

We live in times where our technological capabilities greatly surpass the understanding most of us have of them. If only a few of us understand how a telephone works, we can safely assume that even fewer comprehend what goes on inside a computer. We simply don't know anymore how stuff works - so how can we trust it?

But we should. Machines are more predictable than humans, since they don't have minds of their own, and their suitability for a given task can be established in controlled environments before they are released into the wild. With humans, you never really know what they'll do next.

Redefining normal

It is frequently argued that mechanised brains may not be able to improvise the way humans can, making driverless vehicles easy prey for unforeseen adversity. While this is true, the other side of the coin is that an ability to improvise in odd circumstances may be less valuable than an ability to always respond accurately within a set framework of normal situations. Normal situations, after all, occur at a far higher frequency. In short, a truck or train capable of doing the right thing every time in a normal context is better than a truck with the ability to evade a zombie apocalypse if it happens. They are also less likely to go on strike.

PA Images

Besides, the wealth of experience gathered by human operators can now be programmed into the circuits of all driverless vehicles, creating a high level of ability to understand and react to situations we will never have among human drivers.

All things considered, a vehicle operated by a well-programmed computer is set to be superior to a human operator in all but the most unusual situations - which are far less likely to occur than those which frequently trip up human operators. It is very doubtful that any computer in charge of operating a vehicle will ever get distracted, suicidal, angry, irrational, or drunk. It will never act malevolently, it won't be texting on its smart phone when it shouldn't be, or be having an argument with its passenger. And it probably won't get creative and attempt to impress or scare another vehicle operator.

It would seem logical to assume that the level of technology required for running a comparably simple operation like a train on tracks between stations is there. The biggest obstacle is our will.

Indeed, the barrier between us and a new, reliable world of driverless transport may only be our inability to understand - and feel comfortable with - the technology. It will take experience to build that trust, and the chance for this to happen has arrived with the Las Vegas driverless bus.

Perhaps it's time to get on board.

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How driverless transport could bring an end to commuter rail strike misery

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It's not easy being a rail passenger in Britain. In recent months, London and south-east England have regularly ground to a halt in a series of rail and Underground strikes, disrupting the lives of millions. A newspaper headline even claimed that the situation was so dire that commuters might be hired by one firm - Southern Rail - to drive the trains themselves.