13 ms·

Remote driving in UK from abroad should not be allowed, says Law Commission

28 points by hanoz 4y ago

jansan 4y ago
I Germany you pay easily 2500€ to get a driver's license. Just the thought that you would share the road with cars driven remotely by call center employees in Asia is hilarious and frightening at the same time.
- ta1243 4y ago
  My understanding in the US is that in many states the process to get a driving license is barely more than "Can you show me your car" "Yes, it's that one" "OK, here's your license"
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - madsbuch 4y ago
    This is not the case in Europe. In Denmark you need to pass both a theoretical and practical test (With a large percentage of people failing). In Denmark a driver license set you back roughly 2000 EUR and requires you to take 29x45min theory lessons and 24x45min on roads with a certified teacher.
    - wil421 4y ago
      I don’t think it’s the case in my state either. Beside having a permit for 1 year and one day you have to take a test as well as the following: >You must complete an approved driver education course with a certified private or public driver training school using one of the following methods. Approved classes are also offered online. You must also complete each item in the method you choose. Method 1 30 hours of classroom instruction 6 hours behind the wheel training at the certified school 40 hours of supervised driving with a parent or guardian (6 hours of the 40 hours must be at night) Method 2 30 hours of classroom instruction at the certified school 40 hours parent-taught behind-the-wheel training. Parent/Teen Driving Guide (includes 40 hours of supervised driving with parent or guardian) Method 3 30 hours of online instruction with a certified virtual program 6 hours behind the wheel training at a certified school 40 hours of supervised driving with a parent or guardian (6 hours of the 40 hours must be at night) Method 4 30 hours of online instruction with a certified virtual program 40 hours of parent-taught behind-the-wheel training. After you do the above you need to take a driving test. You need to be able to parallel park, reverse park, and do a variety of things while driving around. Not sure where European readers could be located, but snow driving is not taught in my state. We get snow every couple years at most and it rarely sticks to roads.
  - llampx 4y ago
    It really depends. I had to have a real driving test with surface streets, highway driving, as well as parallel and reverse 90 degree parking. In Minnesota. Where I was just exchanging my license for a US/Minnesotan one.
  - danielrpa 4y ago
    Has this person ever lived in the US? I had to take a pretty demanding law test with a 90% passing grade, a parking test and a street driving test when I got my US driving license.
    - nivenkos 4y ago
      It depends massively on the state no? CA was pretty tough, they even fail you for driving too slow.
      - calpaterson 4y ago
        You can be failed for driving too slow in the UK as well. "Undue hesitance".
    - sanitycheck 4y ago
      Here's a relevant article by someone who experienced getting an American license and a British license: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/uk-driving-law-versus-us https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/uk-dri... (Not sure how accurate that is, as with all things on the internet.)
  - smcl 4y ago
    I can only speak of what I've heard from people I know, but I've not heard anything like this in the USA, though it is a little odd to think of people as young as 14 driving around. A few friends from remote countryside had relatively easy driving tests, but the easiest-sounding test was my friend from Mumbai (he'd always refer to it as "Bombay" and I never figured out if that was his preference or if he was trying to accommodate us). He said his driving test boiled down to driving round a block and not hitting anything or doing something particularly stupid.
    - ta1243 4y ago
      > driving round a block and not hitting anything To be honest I'd struggle to do that in most Indian cities, and I've got 25 years experience of not hitting anything in the UK.
- incompatible 4y ago
  Perhaps it would be cheaper to hire somebody in the call centre to drive your car than to get the license to do it yourself.
- dom96 4y ago
  It can be as high as that in the UK as well. Depending on how many lessons you need. The driver's test is certainly far more difficult than the one in the US. I'm actually going through this now in the UK and I feel like the way they do it could be much better. The randomness of driving on real roads makes luck an important factor to passing.
  - nerdawson 4y ago
    Realistically it should be around half that. The average driver needs 45 hours worth of lessons. Add to that the cost of a provisional license, the theory test, and the driving test and it’s around £1,300.
    - verbify 4y ago
      That was approximately my cost (in London). £22 per hour, 40 lessons, then an additional £100 for the instructor to take me to the test, wait, and drop me home. Add in the cost of the theory/practical test, and the inflation of the last 6 years, and you arrive at your figure.
      - nivenkos 4y ago
        Damn, how did you find such "cheap" lessons? Even in Spain it was about 22 quid per 45 minutes and then 150 euros for the test. And here in Sweden it's double that across the board :/
  - notahacker 4y ago
    How would they do it better? The randomness of real roads is something drivers have to deal with, and the test routes are supposed to be 45 minutes covering a variety of road conditions, so it's near impossible to pass if you haven't got the hang of basics like picking a suitable lane and merging at roundabouts and checking stuff in mirrors which is what it's testing for, regardless of traffic levels and roadworks and some cities having different layouts to others. There isn't an expectation that new drivers will never be flummoxed by encountering weird behaviour from other drivers or an oddly laid out junction, and you can rebook another test asap if you're confident the only things you were failed on were hesitancy or overcorrection in response to chance events. As with most learning processes which finish with an exam, the need to undergo a general learning process to get to the stage where it's likely that you will actually pass is more important than the exact equivalence of the tests.
- the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
  I would be curious though if the more expensive and involved driving license in many European countries results in better outcomes though. Wouldn't be surprised if the main factor is practice over everything else.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    > Wouldn't be surprised if the main factor is practice over everything else. European driving licenses are expensive because they require more practice. You pay for the practice hours. The tests themselves are much cheaper.
  - calpaterson 4y ago
    > I would be curious though if the more expensive and involved driving license in many European countries results in better outcomes though. It doesn't. UK road fatalities are very low compared to mainland Europe and it doesn't matter much whether your divisor for that stat is number of vehicles or number of miles driven. It's arguable how much of that is down to the driving test and how much down to other factors like rules, rule following behavior, etc etc - but I think at least some of it is.
esperent 4y ago
The commission lists a whole load of reasons why this is an issue (loss of connection, cyber attack, etc.). But these are all just as much a problem if someone is remotely driving a car from Gdansk or from Brighton. Possibly connection errors and response times would become an issue at much greater distances and that'd mean you couldn't have someone in Saigon driving a car in London. But there's no technical reason it couldn't be done from Eastern Europe. However, they do list one reason that matters a lot: criminal liability. What happens if the overworked, underpaid driver in a Hertz sweatshop in Hyderabad breaks traffic laws, or crashes and injures someone? Which will happen.
- chippiewill 4y ago
  I agree, liability is definitely the most important reason.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Coming soon: British remote driving centers connected to the internet via Tor.
- gadders 4y ago
  I've heard that even if an in-person driven lorry from Eastern Europe crashes into you in the UK, your UK insurance company will use your insurance to pay out for the damage and won't even bother trying to recoup the costs.
  - precommunicator 4y ago
    Maybe in practice, but legally any third party liability insurance from any EU+Green Card (see https://www.cobx.org https://www.cobx.org) countries have to have representative in any other country, and definitely are liable.
    - gadders 4y ago
      Yes, but I think the insurance companies have done a cost benefit analysis of spending 3 weeks on the phone vs dinging someone else for the £2k or whatever the accident cost.
Jenk 4y ago
I did not know that this is a thing. I mean it's not something I am/should be surprised that is a thing - hell we 'offshore' all sorts of things and the tech is completely there - but I do have to wonder what safeguards are in place. The picture shows the car without anyone in the driving seat, which I would hope is not what the company selling the service is encouraging (a la Tesla 'Autopilot' still requires an attentive driver to override when necessary) but without any kind of regulation I also wouldn't be surprised if they did.
- defrost 4y ago
  There's eight years and two billion tonnes moved of quasi autonomous remote mine machinery operation already in the bag - 100 tonne trucks etc operating autonomously with oversight control from 1,200 km away. eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmCSRg5p7-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmCSRg5p7-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bki-SfbzkKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bki-SfbzkKQ It's not a great leap from there to remote car delivery, etc.
  - Jenk 4y ago
    They don't have as much unexpected behaviour to contend with. Navigating busy streets and highways is significantly more prone to an unexpected incident of some kind occuring than those mining setups are, even if the severity of outcome is not as catastrophic in terms of vehicle destruction. No pedestrians or pets to be concerned about for a start, but it's far safer when _everything_ on the road is (semi)autonomous or remotely operated with the proper procedures and guidelines than it is to remotely operate a vehicle in a thick soup of pedestrians, (motor)cyclists, and manually operated vehicles.
    - defrost 4y ago
      Sure, and, of course, there are accidents and there is a mix of autonomous and people operated vehicles on site. The main point here is that there is eight years prior art in real world conditions dealing with 1,000 km + remote driving | oversight with dropped connections and extreme heat, winds, lightning, dust storms, unexpected blockages in roads, etc. That's a foundation that can be built on and extended.
qlm 4y ago
Can't wait to get killed by a car driven by somebody with 250ms of latency, 20% packet loss, who is underpaid and is forced to drive 3 cars at once. Driving also varies a lot between countries. I can't imagine having to switch between left- and right-hand driving multiple times a day, let alone remotely. Nor can I imagine switching between the relatively calm (if somewhat pedestrian hostile) style of driving in the UK, to the structured chaos of driving somewhere like India.
- calpaterson 4y ago
  > relatively calm (if somewhat pedestrian hostile) style of driving in the UK The UK is pedestrian hostile? In comparison to where? It's always seemed to me one of the most pro-pedestrian countries, eg there is no such thing as "jaywalking": you can cross anywhere and cars are obliged to stop once you're "established in the road" - plus they are obliged to stop at all times on zebras.
  - keiferski 4y ago
    I think I only saw one or two zebra crossings in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. The vast majority of crossings are only marked on the ground with a ridged plate. I would agree with the grandparent poster that the UK is pedestrian hostile. The sidewalks are too narrow and the roads too wide. Having double decker buses drive by (only feet away) is an unpleasant experience.
  - alibarber 4y ago
    I was surprised coming to Finland from the UK. It seems much more pedestrian hostile here (in Finland) in my opinion. It seems pretty rare for people to stop at a zebra crossing here unless you're actually already in front of them (in Finland). Also in the UK traffic lights 'protect' the crossing - i.e. you will never get a green light to turn across a crossing that has a 'green man'. This means here that drivers want to get closer to the pedestrians that are crossing and 'squeeze through' as soon as they can, to avoid holding up people behind during their 'turn' of the green light. Edited to clarify that I think it is more pedestrian hostile in Finland than the UK.
aaron695 4y ago
[dead]
KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
What about those itsy bitsy delivery rovers by companies like coco?
_vbnz 4y ago
Real Late Stage Capitalism to push up the cost of learning to drive to absurd amounts (along with a massive shortage in driving test places) - easily 3k+ GBP nowadays, and then just offshore driving jobs remotely.
pcthrowaway 4y ago
I think remote driving could be interesting in combination with automated driving. For example, self-driving cars are already "safer" than human drivers in ideal conditions, but what about when conditions change rapidly. Can a self-driving car detect when the situation is 100% ideal and it's 100% certain there is nothing going wrong, and differentiate from being less than 100% sure that everything is optimal? Can a human at a dispatch center be brought in to potentially assist when this happens? And can this make the trip overall safer? For example, a self-driving car driving along an empty highway in daylight on a dry day is very unlikely to encounter any issues, but an animal may still jump out in front of the car. If that happens, it should be able to brake on its own, but a human at a dispatch center might be brought in as copilot also, to ensure things go smoothly. Maybe it's not an animal, but a shadow crossing the road from a stray cloud overhead. The AI might not be able to determine 100% whether it's safe to proceed. A human can make this determination and continue the trip (or slam on the brakes)
- airza 4y ago
  Why not just have a human in the car??? Is equipping a car with a 5g modem so that you can pay 2$/hr an hour to someone in SEA to drive your car really the horizon of human achievement?
  - luckylion 4y ago
    You'd only need a human while the car is driving. If the human needs to be physically in the car, they couldn't just switch to a different car when this one has been parked, and you'd need to organize their own travel when they take a car somewhere remote, or need to fetch it from there. This would still be massively cheaper even if you pay the driver whatever you'd pay them locally for driving in person, simply because of less downtime, e.g. while a truck is being loaded.
    - airza 4y ago
      So it’s being a driver without any of the downtime of a driver? That’s somehow even worse!
robotfelix 4y ago
The article makes it clear that the UK definition of "driving a vehicle" is currently centred on the physical location of the vehicle, inverse legal question of "Is the driver considered to be driving a vehicle in the country where they are physically location country?" which I'd imagine varies quite a lot too as many countries probably didn't foresee remote operation when drafting their laws. You could potentially end up in a situation where a remote driver in Estonia needs a driving license and insurance in both Estonia and the UK to fully cover themselves.
- precommunicator 4y ago
  Generally any third party liability insurance from any EU+Green Card countries (see https://www.cobx.org https://www.cobx.org) is valid in any other country. Same with the driving license, but EU+Vienna Convention countries (2 or 3 different conventions actually - and in case of driving license, this means most of the world)
- willyt 4y ago
  And a minicab license as well maybe?
petodo 4y ago
Dunno about UK, but if you can remotely murder people in other countries with drones/missiles, I think remote driving is the least of the problems.

28 points by hanoz 4y ago

I Germany you pay easily 2500€ to get a driver's license. Just the thought that you would share the road with cars driven remotely by call center employees in Asia is hilarious and frightening at the same time.

ta1243 4y ago
My understanding in the US is that in many states the process to get a driving license is barely more than "Can you show me your car" "Yes, it's that one" "OK, here's your license"
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- madsbuch 4y ago
  This is not the case in Europe. In Denmark you need to pass both a theoretical and practical test (With a large percentage of people failing). In Denmark a driver license set you back roughly 2000 EUR and requires you to take 29x45min theory lessons and 24x45min on roads with a certified teacher.
  - wil421 4y ago
    I don’t think it’s the case in my state either. Beside having a permit for 1 year and one day you have to take a test as well as the following: >You must complete an approved driver education course with a certified private or public driver training school using one of the following methods. Approved classes are also offered online. You must also complete each item in the method you choose. Method 1 30 hours of classroom instruction 6 hours behind the wheel training at the certified school 40 hours of supervised driving with a parent or guardian (6 hours of the 40 hours must be at night) Method 2 30 hours of classroom instruction at the certified school 40 hours parent-taught behind-the-wheel training. Parent/Teen Driving Guide (includes 40 hours of supervised driving with parent or guardian) Method 3 30 hours of online instruction with a certified virtual program 6 hours behind the wheel training at a certified school 40 hours of supervised driving with a parent or guardian (6 hours of the 40 hours must be at night) Method 4 30 hours of online instruction with a certified virtual program 40 hours of parent-taught behind-the-wheel training. After you do the above you need to take a driving test. You need to be able to parallel park, reverse park, and do a variety of things while driving around. Not sure where European readers could be located, but snow driving is not taught in my state. We get snow every couple years at most and it rarely sticks to roads.
- llampx 4y ago
  It really depends. I had to have a real driving test with surface streets, highway driving, as well as parallel and reverse 90 degree parking. In Minnesota. Where I was just exchanging my license for a US/Minnesotan one.
- danielrpa 4y ago
  Has this person ever lived in the US? I had to take a pretty demanding law test with a 90% passing grade, a parking test and a street driving test when I got my US driving license.
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    It depends massively on the state no? CA was pretty tough, they even fail you for driving too slow.
    - calpaterson 4y ago
      You can be failed for driving too slow in the UK as well. "Undue hesitance".
  - sanitycheck 4y ago
    Here's a relevant article by someone who experienced getting an American license and a British license: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/uk-driving-law-versus-us https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/02/uk-dri... (Not sure how accurate that is, as with all things on the internet.)
- smcl 4y ago
  I can only speak of what I've heard from people I know, but I've not heard anything like this in the USA, though it is a little odd to think of people as young as 14 driving around. A few friends from remote countryside had relatively easy driving tests, but the easiest-sounding test was my friend from Mumbai (he'd always refer to it as "Bombay" and I never figured out if that was his preference or if he was trying to accommodate us). He said his driving test boiled down to driving round a block and not hitting anything or doing something particularly stupid.
  - ta1243 4y ago
    > driving round a block and not hitting anything To be honest I'd struggle to do that in most Indian cities, and I've got 25 years experience of not hitting anything in the UK.
incompatible 4y ago
Perhaps it would be cheaper to hire somebody in the call centre to drive your car than to get the license to do it yourself.
dom96 4y ago
It can be as high as that in the UK as well. Depending on how many lessons you need. The driver's test is certainly far more difficult than the one in the US. I'm actually going through this now in the UK and I feel like the way they do it could be much better. The randomness of driving on real roads makes luck an important factor to passing.
- nerdawson 4y ago
  Realistically it should be around half that. The average driver needs 45 hours worth of lessons. Add to that the cost of a provisional license, the theory test, and the driving test and it’s around £1,300.
  - verbify 4y ago
    That was approximately my cost (in London). £22 per hour, 40 lessons, then an additional £100 for the instructor to take me to the test, wait, and drop me home. Add in the cost of the theory/practical test, and the inflation of the last 6 years, and you arrive at your figure.
    - nivenkos 4y ago
      Damn, how did you find such "cheap" lessons? Even in Spain it was about 22 quid per 45 minutes and then 150 euros for the test. And here in Sweden it's double that across the board :/
- notahacker 4y ago
  How would they do it better? The randomness of real roads is something drivers have to deal with, and the test routes are supposed to be 45 minutes covering a variety of road conditions, so it's near impossible to pass if you haven't got the hang of basics like picking a suitable lane and merging at roundabouts and checking stuff in mirrors which is what it's testing for, regardless of traffic levels and roadworks and some cities having different layouts to others. There isn't an expectation that new drivers will never be flummoxed by encountering weird behaviour from other drivers or an oddly laid out junction, and you can rebook another test asap if you're confident the only things you were failed on were hesitancy or overcorrection in response to chance events. As with most learning processes which finish with an exam, the need to undergo a general learning process to get to the stage where it's likely that you will actually pass is more important than the exact equivalence of the tests.
the_mitsuhiko 4y ago
I would be curious though if the more expensive and involved driving license in many European countries results in better outcomes though. Wouldn't be surprised if the main factor is practice over everything else.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  > Wouldn't be surprised if the main factor is practice over everything else. European driving licenses are expensive because they require more practice. You pay for the practice hours. The tests themselves are much cheaper.
- calpaterson 4y ago
  > I would be curious though if the more expensive and involved driving license in many European countries results in better outcomes though. It doesn't. UK road fatalities are very low compared to mainland Europe and it doesn't matter much whether your divisor for that stat is number of vehicles or number of miles driven. It's arguable how much of that is down to the driving test and how much down to other factors like rules, rule following behavior, etc etc - but I think at least some of it is.

esperent 4y ago

The commission lists a whole load of reasons why this is an issue (loss of connection, cyber attack, etc.). But these are all just as much a problem if someone is remotely driving a car from Gdansk or from Brighton. Possibly connection errors and response times would become an issue at much greater distances and that'd mean you couldn't have someone in Saigon driving a car in London. But there's no technical reason it couldn't be done from Eastern Europe. However, they do list one reason that matters a lot: criminal liability. What happens if the overworked, underpaid driver in a Hertz sweatshop in Hyderabad breaks traffic laws, or crashes and injures someone? Which will happen.

chippiewill 4y ago
I agree, liability is definitely the most important reason.
- hedora 4y ago
  Coming soon: British remote driving centers connected to the internet via Tor.
gadders 4y ago
I've heard that even if an in-person driven lorry from Eastern Europe crashes into you in the UK, your UK insurance company will use your insurance to pay out for the damage and won't even bother trying to recoup the costs.
- precommunicator 4y ago
  Maybe in practice, but legally any third party liability insurance from any EU+Green Card (see https://www.cobx.org https://www.cobx.org) countries have to have representative in any other country, and definitely are liable.
  - gadders 4y ago
    Yes, but I think the insurance companies have done a cost benefit analysis of spending 3 weeks on the phone vs dinging someone else for the £2k or whatever the accident cost.

Jenk 4y ago

I did not know that this is a thing. I mean it's not something I am/should be surprised that is a thing - hell we 'offshore' all sorts of things and the tech is completely there - but I do have to wonder what safeguards are in place. The picture shows the car without anyone in the driving seat, which I would hope is not what the company selling the service is encouraging (a la Tesla 'Autopilot' still requires an attentive driver to override when necessary) but without any kind of regulation I also wouldn't be surprised if they did.

defrost 4y ago
There's eight years and two billion tonnes moved of quasi autonomous remote mine machinery operation already in the bag - 100 tonne trucks etc operating autonomously with oversight control from 1,200 km away. eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmCSRg5p7-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmCSRg5p7-E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bki-SfbzkKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bki-SfbzkKQ It's not a great leap from there to remote car delivery, etc.
- Jenk 4y ago
  They don't have as much unexpected behaviour to contend with. Navigating busy streets and highways is significantly more prone to an unexpected incident of some kind occuring than those mining setups are, even if the severity of outcome is not as catastrophic in terms of vehicle destruction. No pedestrians or pets to be concerned about for a start, but it's far safer when _everything_ on the road is (semi)autonomous or remotely operated with the proper procedures and guidelines than it is to remotely operate a vehicle in a thick soup of pedestrians, (motor)cyclists, and manually operated vehicles.
  - defrost 4y ago
    Sure, and, of course, there are accidents and there is a mix of autonomous and people operated vehicles on site. The main point here is that there is eight years prior art in real world conditions dealing with 1,000 km + remote driving | oversight with dropped connections and extreme heat, winds, lightning, dust storms, unexpected blockages in roads, etc. That's a foundation that can be built on and extended.

qlm 4y ago

Can't wait to get killed by a car driven by somebody with 250ms of latency, 20% packet loss, who is underpaid and is forced to drive 3 cars at once. Driving also varies a lot between countries. I can't imagine having to switch between left- and right-hand driving multiple times a day, let alone remotely. Nor can I imagine switching between the relatively calm (if somewhat pedestrian hostile) style of driving in the UK, to the structured chaos of driving somewhere like India.

calpaterson 4y ago
> relatively calm (if somewhat pedestrian hostile) style of driving in the UK The UK is pedestrian hostile? In comparison to where? It's always seemed to me one of the most pro-pedestrian countries, eg there is no such thing as "jaywalking": you can cross anywhere and cars are obliged to stop once you're "established in the road" - plus they are obliged to stop at all times on zebras.
- keiferski 4y ago
  I think I only saw one or two zebra crossings in London, Oxford, and Cambridge. The vast majority of crossings are only marked on the ground with a ridged plate. I would agree with the grandparent poster that the UK is pedestrian hostile. The sidewalks are too narrow and the roads too wide. Having double decker buses drive by (only feet away) is an unpleasant experience.
- alibarber 4y ago
  I was surprised coming to Finland from the UK. It seems much more pedestrian hostile here (in Finland) in my opinion. It seems pretty rare for people to stop at a zebra crossing here unless you're actually already in front of them (in Finland). Also in the UK traffic lights 'protect' the crossing - i.e. you will never get a green light to turn across a crossing that has a 'green man'. This means here that drivers want to get closer to the pedestrians that are crossing and 'squeeze through' as soon as they can, to avoid holding up people behind during their 'turn' of the green light. Edited to clarify that I think it is more pedestrian hostile in Finland than the UK.

aaron695 4y ago

[dead]

KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago

What about those itsy bitsy delivery rovers by companies like coco?

_vbnz 4y ago

Real Late Stage Capitalism to push up the cost of learning to drive to absurd amounts (along with a massive shortage in driving test places) - easily 3k+ GBP nowadays, and then just offshore driving jobs remotely.

pcthrowaway 4y ago

I think remote driving could be interesting in combination with automated driving. For example, self-driving cars are already "safer" than human drivers in ideal conditions, but what about when conditions change rapidly. Can a self-driving car detect when the situation is 100% ideal and it's 100% certain there is nothing going wrong, and differentiate from being less than 100% sure that everything is optimal? Can a human at a dispatch center be brought in to potentially assist when this happens? And can this make the trip overall safer? For example, a self-driving car driving along an empty highway in daylight on a dry day is very unlikely to encounter any issues, but an animal may still jump out in front of the car. If that happens, it should be able to brake on its own, but a human at a dispatch center might be brought in as copilot also, to ensure things go smoothly. Maybe it's not an animal, but a shadow crossing the road from a stray cloud overhead. The AI might not be able to determine 100% whether it's safe to proceed. A human can make this determination and continue the trip (or slam on the brakes)

airza 4y ago
Why not just have a human in the car??? Is equipping a car with a 5g modem so that you can pay 2$/hr an hour to someone in SEA to drive your car really the horizon of human achievement?
- luckylion 4y ago
  You'd only need a human while the car is driving. If the human needs to be physically in the car, they couldn't just switch to a different car when this one has been parked, and you'd need to organize their own travel when they take a car somewhere remote, or need to fetch it from there. This would still be massively cheaper even if you pay the driver whatever you'd pay them locally for driving in person, simply because of less downtime, e.g. while a truck is being loaded.
  - airza 4y ago
    So it’s being a driver without any of the downtime of a driver? That’s somehow even worse!

robotfelix 4y ago

The article makes it clear that the UK definition of "driving a vehicle" is currently centred on the physical location of the vehicle, inverse legal question of "Is the driver considered to be driving a vehicle in the country where they are physically location country?" which I'd imagine varies quite a lot too as many countries probably didn't foresee remote operation when drafting their laws. You could potentially end up in a situation where a remote driver in Estonia needs a driving license and insurance in both Estonia and the UK to fully cover themselves.

precommunicator 4y ago
Generally any third party liability insurance from any EU+Green Card countries (see https://www.cobx.org https://www.cobx.org) is valid in any other country. Same with the driving license, but EU+Vienna Convention countries (2 or 3 different conventions actually - and in case of driving license, this means most of the world)
willyt 4y ago
And a minicab license as well maybe?

petodo 4y ago

Dunno about UK, but if you can remotely murder people in other countries with drones/missiles, I think remote driving is the least of the problems.