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Kind: captions
Language: en-GB

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This is a driverless vehicle. In the wild,
amongst the public, with no backup driver.

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This is the Transport Research Laboratory's
Meridian Shuttle. It doesn't look like a sports

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car, but that's not the point: it doesn't
have to.

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Now, new Tesla vehicles can have 'autopilot'
which is very shiny, but isn't that different

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from the lane-assist systems we've had for
a few years. They can't drive on their own.

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Google's autonomous cars sound great, but
they won't work in snow and heavy rain yet,

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and they require a driver that's alert and
ready to take over just in case. This vehicle:

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you tap a button on a touchscreen, and it
genuinely drives itself, without a backup

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driver behind the wheel. It doesn't even have
a wheel.

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This is only a trial -- but for a vehicle
that's among real pedestrians, it's got a

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surprising amount of speed to it.

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So let's go back 150 years. The Locomotive
Act 1865 limited all horseless carriages to

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4mph -- 2mph in cities -- and required them
to have a man walking in front with a red

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flag to warn people who might pass by. It
sounds ridiculous, but remember: they were

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still 50 years away from the Model T Ford
-- these were steam powered vehicles, all

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coal and soot. They were new, they were scary,
and there was a risk they'd fail catastrophically.

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That's kind of where we are with driverless
vehicles. They're a little clunky, they're

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a little slow, and there's a lot less risk
of catastrophic failure without a steam boiler

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-- but they're still a curiosity.

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Over the century that followed the Locomotive
Act, we learned what the risks of cars were,

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and we learned to accept a lot of them: worldwide,
more than a million people a year die on the

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roads, and we accept that risk because we're
used to it, and because the alternative means

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our world doesn't work any more. In fifty
years, a descendent of this shuttle might

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be whisking people around at much higher speeds,
and in safety. Maybe we'll look back at this

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early step and think, wait, really, they didn't
even allow them on public roads? They had

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to have large flourescent markings on them,
just in case they scared people? How quaint.

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And then we'll tell our cars to take us home,
and we won't think any more about it.

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