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Christian Wolmar argues that autonomous cars are the wrong solution to the wrong problem. Even if the many technical difficulties that stand in the way of achieving a driverless future can be surmounted, autonomous cars are not the best way to address the problems of congestion and pollution caused by our long obsession with the private car.
Driverless cars are the future. That is what the tech giants, the auto industry and even the government want us to think. Almost daily there are media stories about how we will soon all be able to rip up our driving licences, sit in the back seat and let the car take us around.
But is this really going to happen?
Christian Wolmar has dug behind the hype and found a very different story. We are nowhere near this driverless utopia. Indeed it may prove to be impossible to reach. And even if it were achievable, does anyone want it? Far from reducing traffic and pollution, millions of zombie cars on the roads would make them worse.
In this revised and updated edition of his 2018 book, Wolmar looks at the technical and other difficulties that make this driverless future a very uncertain proposition. He finds that it is the tech companies and the auto manufacturers who are desperate to get us out of the driving seat, and argues that far from making the roads safer, driverless cars may well make them more dangerous.
This entertaining polemic sets out the many technical, legal and moral problems that obstruct the path to a driverless future, and debunks many of the myths around that future’s purported benefits.
“Driverless Cars doesn’t pull any punches, remaining very rational and cutting through what many fail to see as marketing hype – yet it’s not particularly anti-car, which is an easy trap to fall into. ****” — Auto Express
“Driverless Cars questions the logic of us all taking our hands off the wheel. It is helpful that Wolmar breaks the groupthink and poses some pertinent questions. Emerging technologies in ‘driverless cars’ can make vehicles safer but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t question who has ultimate control.” — Edmund King, AA president
“This is just what the robot evangelists don’t want you to read: a rational, level-headed, compelling yet cheerful analysis of why the driverless car’s route to success is so uncertain. Wolmar has simmered the hype to reveal real-world motor-industry paranoia and tech-sector hubris, and he explains why autonomous cars probably aren’t coming to a street near you anything like as soon as you’ve been led to believe.” — Giles Chapman, commentator on car culture and award-winning author
“Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere? demonstrates once again why Christian Wolmar is such an excellent – and much-needed – transport writer. This book is an indispensable and thought-provoking counterpoint to what seems to have become the accepted wisdom on autonomous vehicles. Read it and you will definitely think twice next time you are told that they’re the answer to our transport problems.” — Jon Shaw, Professor of Geography at University of Plymouth
“Christian Wolmar shows us that the issues surrounding autonomous vehicles are basically about the power and freedom of different types of road user, and who wins and loses from their application. He lists in detail the issues that work against autonomous vehicles being any real kind of solution to the health and environmental transport problems we have. This book is a powerful argument against further resources going up the ‘road to nowhere’.” — Robert Davis, Chair of the Road Danger Reduction Forum
“Christian Wolmar, a seasoned transport writer, is deeply critical of the hype that surrounds autonomous vehicles. His scepticism, well-argued in the first edition, has been borne out by the subsequent lack of progress in getting genuinely driverless cars on the road, as he documents in this second edition.” — David Metz, honorary professor in the Centre for Transport Studies at UCL and author of Travel Fast or Smart?
This book maps out how to design better transport. Engineers measure success by speed and efficiency – but these are not the way that passengers think about a good trip. We choose how to travel, influenced not only by speed and time but by habit, status, comfort, variety – and many other factors that engineering equations don’t capture at all.
If you have ever wondered why the roads are congested, the trains are full and the buses are no longer running, this book provides the answers. The UK has never had a proper transport policy and it desperately needs one to address the twin challengers of getting people around cheaply and safely, while safeguarding the environment.
The book sets out the potential for financial services in metaverses and the ‘always-on’ immersive internet, beginning with a look at the technologies needed to make these metaverses useful for business. It describes the ways in which new markets will function and the digital assets that will be exchanged in transactions between online identities.
Money is changing, and this book looks at where the technology of money might be taking us in the future. Technology has moved our concept of money from physical things, to unseen bits of information. But the shape of the future can be seen in the distant past.
This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand and navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of digital property and mortgage transactions. It offers a nuanced understanding of the transformative forces that are shaping the digital property market, and it provides a stark warning to market incumbents on the need to evolve their business models, their technology and their cybersecurity capabilities.
This book sets out the principles that could underpin a strategic policy for transport. Instead of focusing piecemeal on trying (and failing) to get from place to place ever faster, we need to think about how and where we want the economy to develop, and about how new the digital technologies can help achieve this.
