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While comprehensive self-driving vehicles are "some decades" away, Australian authorities must start preparing for a "significant" impact on employment, transportation and other industries.
That's the expert view offered by representatives from the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development who gave evidence to a Parliamentary Committee inquiry into the social issues relating to driverless vehicles in Australia.
A panel led by Alex Foulds, executive director of surface transport for the department, told political representatives in Canberra that Australia was working with international experts and authorities to develop a legislative framework surrounding the use of self-driving cars.
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Foulds says the autonomous vehicle movement has "developed rapidly" and that Australia is "broadly on par with other countries" as they prepare to introduce self-driving vehicles.
Telling the committee that "it is not clear" exactly when self-driving technology will become commonplace, the transport expert poured cold water on the notion that people will soon be riding around in driverless pods.
"It's important to note that driverless vehicles can be a misnomer as it will be some decades before there is a fully driverless vehicle that can drive in all situations without monitoring by a human driver," he says.
Australian authorities have adopted autonomous vehicle definitions developed by the Society of Automotive Engineers that range from level zero, with no automation, to fully autonomous level five vehicles that cannot be driven by people.
Foulds says level two vehicles are already here in the form of car systems such as Tesla's autopilot, and higher function models are on the way.
"By 2020 several manufactures expect to offer vehicles that can undertake all necessary driving functions in certain conditions that may need to hand control back to a human driver at certain points - that's a level three," he says.
"Highly automated vehicles, level 4, which do not require human intervention, are expected to be commercially available between 2020 and 2030.
"We can't give a time for when vehicles might be commercially available with true level five capability, where automated systems are in control at all times."
The inquiry heard how some manufacturers are pushing governments to invest in electronic car-to-car and car-to-object infrastructure, while others such as Google were working on self-reliant machinery that take extremely accurate data from satellites. The department spoke of plans to use electronic markers between infrastructure and vehicles to prevent cyber attacks from occurring - ensuring that self-driving cars get the right message at traffic lights, level crossings and other areas.
Acknowledging that the technology faces a range of challenges including winning over public trust, representatives spoke of the need for increased testing and research before the technology is broadly rolled out.
Phillipa Power, executive director of policy and research at the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, says that will give governments more time to focus a "quite considerable" amount on how automation will affect thousands of jobs around the country.
"The reality is that automation, whether it be for vehicles or other things, has the potential to impact in quite significant ways on Australia's labour market, particularly in areas where automation begins to replace what we would consider lower skilled or unskilled jobs," she says.
"It is an area that the Australian government is looking at more broadly and it's not one that is solved by any one agency."
Citing Uber's disruptive influence on the taxi industry as an example, Power says it is important "to when new technologies come in so you can plan for the introduction and start to transition the workforce".
"It's not any different for the transport sector than it is for any other sector," she says.
"Where the shock is difficult to deal with is when you don't get lead times, and this is in area where we will have significant lead times.
"It will open new opportunities for people."
1 Comments
Self driving cars? In Australia? Yeah right, how will all those good for nothing highway patrol officers book you for speeding then?