The government funding agency Innovate UK has launched a £10-million (US$15-million) project to study how autonomous, self-driving vehicles will fit into daily life in four parts of England: Greenwich, Coventry, Milton Keynes and Bristol. Good job. That is the right kind of question to ask about driverless cars. As described in a News Feature on page 20, developers such as Google are making rapid progress on the vehicles. From a technical standpoint, the cars could be ready for widespread deployment within a decade. But when and how they will hit the streets depends on how well people accept and trust them. Consider, for example, the obvious economic question: will people be able to afford them? Thanks to the need for sophisticated equipment, the vehicles are likely to be much more expensive than their conventional counterparts, at least initially. And that means that buyers will need to see correspondingly large benefits.
展开▼
