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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?
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