The UK government should create laws common to autonomous vehicles to avoid a patchwork approach to specific technologies, according to industry figures speaking to MPs.
As various levels of automation are planned for modes of transport including cars, buses, delivery robots, trains and aeroplanes, the UK should create a legislative framework which captures them all said Siddartha Khastgir, head of verification and validation of connected and autonomous vehicles at Warwick University’s Manufacturing Group.
Khastgir said: “You can take a similar approach to safety assurance, trying to prove Starship robots as safe [and] trying to prove Stagecoach buses are safe. The accepted level of safety for Starship robots would be very different as compared to the scenarios that we will test Stage Coach buses, but it's at one level of abstraction, the approach to safety assurance [we're] trying to prove can be the same.
He said bespoke safety frameworks for different use cases would confuse industry. “We want to create a level of abstraction that is same for all types of use cases.” Differences in safety regulation would then apply to different operating domains — motor ways compared with pavements, for example — rather than individual technologies, he said.
Absolutely. It's imperative that autonomous vehicles are regulated because what one company deems safe a copycat may not. We need to avoid tragic accidents being the catalyst for such regulations.