2017/19: Should Australia adopt driverless vehicles?
Introduction to the media issue
Video clip at right: On November 29, 2017, 9 News Perth televised a segment outlining the city's plans to trial driverless hire cars after April 2018.What they said...
'A large proportion (of car accidents) could be avoided by using self-driving vehicles'
Hussein Dia, chair of Civil Engineering at Swinburne University of Technology
' If we see children distracted by the ice cream truck across the street, we know to slow down, as they may dash toward it. Today's computers aren't nearly as skilled at interpreting complex situations like these'
Andrew Ng, director of Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning
The issue at a glance
On November 29, 2017, it was announced that Perth would be one of the first cities in the world to test fully-automated vehicles in 2018. The city will trial driverless hire cars capable of picking up passengers.
The year before, in August 2016, Perth began trialling Australia's first driverless shuttle bus along the foreshore in South Perth.
The technology is proving attractive to other Australian states and territories who are already making changes to road laws to ready themselves for trials of automated vehicles.
However, a range of analysts have suggested the enthusiasm for automated vehicles is premature and that the new technology will be more problematic than many realise.