Here’s a point I’ve been meaning to mention for some time, and haven’t seen brought up often. I don’t know if this is an insuperable barrier to ever achieving Level 5, but it seems to me that it could become a potentially serious problem in Levels 3 and 4.
The very process of making cars smarter is making drivers dumber. This probably started with automatic transmission. When you have to know how to shift gears, you gain a better sense of what is going on with your car. With auto, all you have to know is “right foot down = faster.” It may not seem like a big thing, but you lose the innate sense of the engine’s power band, the understanding that you should often be in a lower gear if things are slippery, and other things that give you a connection to what the car is doing and how to handle it. And yes, you can learn these things in an auto, but the vast majority of people don’t.
The next steps in making drivers stupider, which came along at about the same time, and are now mandatory in the U.S., were ABS and stability control. For the record, they both greatly enhance safety, and I’m not opposed to them or the regulations that required them. But before they were common, drivers had to pay more attention in wet and slippery conditions, and experienced drivers developed handling skills to do some of the things that ABS and stability control handle automagically. In northern climes, pretty much all drivers learn how to handle a car in the snow. It’s a very useful skill that has application in other conditions, like rain, and on gravel or dirt roads. But elsewhere, a lot of people never get the chance to learn these skills.
Traction control can prevent or mitigate accidents caused by poor car control, but so can better driver training. As some here may know, for about ten years I was a High Performance Driver’s Ed instructor, teaching race driving techniques to people in their ordinary street cars on closed race tracks. The track where I started doing this also offered a one-day course called Accident Avoidance, intended to teach young drivers advanced car control to help them…avoid accidents. How to avoid or handle skids, do panic braking, and much more.
But that kind of training is expensive and time consuming, so most 16-year-olds only get a few hours to learn the very basics of operating a car before they’re allowed to pilot a potentially deadly 3,000-pound projectile on the public roads.
Furthermore, it seems to me that the number of people who really don’t like to drive is increasing, and a lot of younger people seem to see driving as time wasted that they could be using to Instagram or Snapchat or whatever it is the kids are doing on their phones these days. They don’t look at driving as a skill that is important to master for its own sake, and that can even be fun.
So every new “driver’s aid” that’s introduced – blind spot detection, lane minding, radar-controlled cruise control, etc., etc. – means drivers don’t have to pay as much attention while driving or know as much about how to handle their vehicle.
The problem is that, as people have posted above, there are a number of driving situations that AVs won’t be able to handle for quite a while, if ever. AIUI, at Levels 3 and 4, in some of those circumstances, the cars will expect the driver to take over. But drivers raised with all these aids will hardly be prepared to do so.
As the cars get smarter, drivers are getting dumber. As those two curves meet, there will be a place where the car is smart enough to know it can’t handle the situation, but the average driver will not be skilled enough to handle it, either. The result will be accidents. And who will be responsible?
Will this stop the development of AVs? Maybe not. But it could become a big obstacle to overcome along the way.