First self-driving cars will be unmarked so that other drivers don’t try to bully them

The first self-driving cars to be operated by ordinary British drivers will be left deliberately unmarked so that other drivers will not be tempted to “take them on”, a senior car industry executive has revealed.

One of the biggest fears of an ambitious project to lease the first autonomous vehicles to everyday motorists is that other road users might slam on their brakes or drive erratically in order to force the driverless cars into submission, he said.

This is why the first 100 self-driving 4x4 vehicles to be leased to motorists as part of a pilot scheme on busy main roads into London will look no different than other Volvos of the same model, said Erik Coelingh, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars. The scheme will start in 2018.

“From the outside you won’t see that it’s a self-driving car. From a purely scientific perspective it would be interesting to have some cars that are marked as self-driving cars and some that are not and see whether other road users react in a different way,” Coelingh told the Observer. “I would expect they will, but I don’t know how and to what extent. So just to be on the safe side they will all be unmarked cars. I’m pretty sure that people will challenge them if they are marked by doing really harsh braking in front of a self-driving car or putting themselves in the way,” he said.

The House of Lords science and technology committee will begin to take evidence on driverless cars on 1 November, looking at issues such as who is legally accountable for a vehicle that “thinks” for itself.

Coelingh’s concerns chime with the findings of a survey published earlier this month by the London School of Economics. It found that aggressive drivers will attempt to “bully” the occupants of autonomous vehicles, which they will see as easy prey on the roads because the cars will follow the rules of the highway.

The study, carried out on 12,000 drivers in 11 countries, found that drivers who are more “combative” will tend to “see autonomous vehicles as easier agents to deal with on the road” than those with drivers at the wheel.

One driver interviewed for the survey said: “I’ll be overtaking all the time because they’ll be sticking to the rules.”

Another said: “They are going to stop. So you’re going to mug them right off. They’re going to stop and you’re just going to nip around.”

Volvo is in negotiations with Transport for London and Highways England to conduct the first pilot scheme on busy UK roads involving selected Volvo customers.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Erik Coelingh, Senior Technical Leader at Volvo Cars, with the very first autonomous XC90 that will be used in the Drive Me project in Gothenburg. Photograph: Volvo

Following a similar scheme due to start next year in the Swedish city of Gothenburg – believed to be the first in the world – the 2018 London pilot will involve asking commuters to switch into self-driving mode on certain roads, such as the M4 from Heathrow to the capital, to see how the cars cope with real traffic conditions, Coelingh revealed at the Hello Tomorrow summit in Paris earlier this month.

The M4 has been chosen as one of the routes into London where drivers will be offered the choice of switching to “autopilot” or continuing in normal driver mode because the traffic conditions, although potentially fast, are more predictable than those on more minor roads into the capital, he said.

“You have to deal with really strange things in real traffic. That’s the basic challenge. It’s easy to make a car drive itself but it’s really difficult to make it safe. The real challenge is to make sure the car can deal with all things that can happen on the road – and that includes human behaviour,” he said.

Volvo has been negotiating with the UK car insurance industry, and its research arm Thatcham Research, to work out who would be held responsible in the event of an accident when a car is in self-drive mode. “If there is a crash and the car is in self-driving mode, even if the driver is reading a newspaper, then we – Volvo – are responsible,” Coelingh said. However, because each self-driving car will be bristling with cameras, radar and laser sensors all feeding data continuously to an on-board “black box” recorder, any mistakes by other car users will be used for third-party claims against other motorists, he warned.

“The principle is easy. If we can find out the root cause of the problem and it’s a third party, then they are responsible,” he said.

“Or if the driver hacked the car or misused the technology then you as the driver or the passenger in the car will be held responsible. But if there is a software bug or whatever that causes a crash then we will be held responsible.”

Meanwhile, Mercedes has made it clear that if a situation arises where a car has to choose between saving the lives of its occupants or those of bystanders, it will save the occupants.

“If you know you can save at least one person, at least save that one. Save the one in the car,” Christoph von Hugo, manager of driver assistance systems and active safety at Mercedes, told the Paris Motor Show recently.