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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64705924

by hanoz • 3 years ago

28 77 3 years ago

bbc.co.uk

jansan• 3 years 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.

ta12432• 3 years 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"

madsbuch• 3 years 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.

llampx• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

smcl• 3 years 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.

incompatible• 3 years 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.

dom962• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

notahacker5• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

calpaterson4• 3 years 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.

esperent2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I agree, liability is definitely the most important reason.

hedora• 3 years ago

Coming soon: British remote driving centers connected to the internet via Tor.

gadders6• 3 years 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.

precommunicator3• 3 years ago

Maybe in practice, but legally any third party liability insurance from any EU+Green Card (see https://www.cobx.org) countries have to have representative in any other country, and definitely are liable.

SideburnsOfDoom3• 3 years ago

I've heard all manner of Xenophobic nonsense, and I don't take it seriously unless evidenced.

esperent2• 3 years ago

pay out for the damage

I mean, cool, but I was rather thinking about criminal liability i.e. when negligence of the remote driver causes death of another road user.

Jenk2• 3 years 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.

defrost2• 3 years 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=bki-SfbzkKQ

It's not a great leap from there to remote car delivery, etc.

Jenk2• 3 years 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.

qlm• 3 years 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.

calpaterson4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

implements2• 3 years ago

Even less pedestrian hostile now that cars have to give way to pedestrians simply waiting to cross a road at a junction:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-highway-code/introduction#ru...

Prioritising the safety of vulnerable Highway users is obviously good, but potentially forcing cars to come to a full stop on a 40 mph road seems like it’s going to cause a fair few high-speed rear end collisions.

notahacker5• 3 years ago

Depends what you consider to be "pedestrian hostile", I guess. There are some countries where the custom is for a pedestrian to see five lanes of traffic and just slowly walk across the road, with the expectation that other drivers will anticipate this behaviour and stop or steer around them. Then again, those countries kill a lot more pedestrians...

Philip-J-Fry3• 3 years ago

The UK has a lot of pedestrian rights. But drivers are hostile against pedestrians and cyclists getting "in their way".

People speed like maniacs in residential areas too. The road outside my house is 30mph, but every time I walk down it I catch a few people clearly going at least 40, probably 50mph.

ClumsyPilot2• 3 years ago

who is underpaid and is forced to drive 3 cars at once

Nono, you will pay to drive, it will be a $100 DLC to the European Truck Simulator (or whatever its called)

mangamadaiyan• 3 years ago

Minor correction - it's just chaos. There's absolutely no need to qualify it with the illusion of structure :)

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

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

nivenkos3• 3 years 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.

pcthrowaway2• 3 years 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)

airza2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

pcthrowaway2• 3 years ago

Let's say you have 1000 self-driving long-haul trips that have an accident rate of anywhere from 0.1*A to 10*A (where A is the rate of accidents with human drivers) with just self-driving.

Let's say 100% of the time there is an accident, the self-driving system is able to determine with at least 1 second of notice that human intervention could make the upcoming segment of the trip safer, and such flagged sections constitute less than 0.1% of the time the vehicle would otherwise be in operation.

Let's also say a highly trained team of 10 people, monitoring that fleet of 1000 vehicles, selected for fast reaction, and with adequate training could theoretically prevent 99% of at-fault incidents, bringing it down to a range of 0.001*A to 0.1*A.

I don't know if this would actually play out, but if the above assumptions were found to be accurate, then it'd be hard to make an argument for having human drivers in the vehicle when this system at scale could reduce at-fault accidents to <10% of the current rate

Think Mechanical Turk meets Lambda for improving self-driving car safety

soneil• 3 years ago

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.

I'm not sure I'd trust a human more than a machine in this circumstance. Just being dropped in with a split-second to make a decision? It's not like you can get 30 seconds of replay to get your bearings etc, otherwise by time the human is ready, the problem's already over.

There's a lot of "state" that a driver should already have built up for this. Traffic, road conditions, who's behind me, etc. Just being thrown into a situation that's rapidly devolving sounds like a nightmare.

robotfelix• 3 years 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.

precommunicator3• 3 years ago

Generally any third party liability insurance from any EU+Green Card countries (see 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)

willyt3• 3 years ago

And a minicab license as well maybe?

petodo• 3 years 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.

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

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