Driverless car convoys – could you give up control of your car?

All very well but it would have to have a fantastically powerful system to warn of imminent failure or malfunction to let the driver take over, assuming he’s not nodded off.
Also if navigating by satnav type technology, how long before the vehicle ends up in a river or down an unmade country track?
All in all it makes me nervous and I’m a dedicated technology fan!

I’m definitely for driverless cars Claire. Like you, I also like driving, but I hate most of the driving I have to do. Driving a car down a quiet undulating B-road is great fun, but driving for hours on end on a motorway or slow moving commuter traffic is just a chore. It really would be great if that time could be freed up to focus on other things.
You wonder whether the systems would be safe enough, but I wonder whether DRIVERS are safe enough. These systems will be so stringently tested before they are allowed on the road that I’m willing to bet that they will have very few errors compared to the thousands of accidents that occur on our roads every day thanks to drivers that have absolutely no checks other than a half hour assessment when they are 17!
All of the major problems on motorway travel are caused by user error, whether that be failing to pay attention (boredom, phones, kids), or driving beyond the safe limits (tailgaiting, excessive speed in bad conditions). If we could take that user error out of the equation potentially we could cut accidents by a massive amount and eliminate traffic jams, which are nearly always caused by the concertina effect of people driving too close to the car in front.
And, to be fair, we are nearly at the point of driverless cars anyway. If you buy the latest models you get cruise control, collision avoidance, lane assist, blind spot monitoring and stanav to name but a few things. The only thing a modern car driver is left doing is holding the steering wheel. It is only a very small step to let go of that as well.
Driverless cars are something that I have been waiting for for a very long time. Having a car at your destination is often such an essential thing that it rules out train travel for a lot of long journeys, but if we could use this technology to make motorway journeys as efficient as travelling by train, but with the freedom when you get there, it really would be the best of both worlds.
My only stipulation? I have to be able to still drive those B-roads when I get to my destination so no iRobot style cars for me, thankyou very much.

Many car manufacturers have problems with designing fault warning light systems that are reliable.

Car electronic should be reliable, but until this has been achieved I am very wary of plans for driverless cars.

Never.

Referring to Angus’s quotes, we are nowhere near driverless cars, brainless drivers yes, but driverless cars no. These are just driver aides that help you to think “what else could I be doing?”

The answer is not twitter, internet and doing your make-up, the answer is driving!

The less time we spend not concentrating on the road, the more accidents we are going to have. Yes perhaps sitting in a driving train might sounds tempting, but what happens when the lorry you’re following wants to overtake? Can he overtake? or is he to just slow down to whatever speed the slowest vehicle is doing?

This would cause way more congestion as everyone will have to slow down to grandpa’s caravan towing speed, effectively making the motorway one huge contraflow.

Also the cost of rolling this out is astronomical and forcing people to spend money/take out a loan to buy another car that they don’t really need is abhorrent.

For me, all the new technology for cars is just designed to make you keep spending your money with them. With new features eventually becoming law or old cars being penalised (like CO2 now), it is just a cynical way to keep us buying more cars.

For a road train to work, it has to be an entirely new road, entirely separate from cars that don’t have the technology.

But this scheme is no different to sitting in your car while it’s on the back of a low-loader driven by a human. It isn’t ‘driverless’ at all and shows no signs of becoming so within the next few decades.

The Volvo demonstration should be regarded as a publicity/sales stunt or gimmick and of no practicable value.
Those people who are unable to drive themselves or are just bone idle can make a ‘driverless’ journey by using a taxi, bus and train or coach to make their journeys.