Driverless cars - Is the idea ahead of its time in India?

A Tesla Model S vehicle is displayed at the Tesla store in Sydney, Australia, March 13, 2017. Picture taken March 13, 2017. REUTERS/Jason Reed - RTX30VMH

While the rest of the world is going ga-ga over the possibility of fully automatic driverless cars, the likelihood of the idea seeing the light of day could be slim in India. Recently, Union Minister for roads and Transport Nitin Gadkari said driverless cars won't be allowed in the country.

According to Gadkari, driverless cars will eat into the jobs of millions engaged in the driving profession. Ola and Uber drivers in India could be put out of jobs and the thriving taxi aggregating business in India would suffer. As per a report in Economic Times, the minister also believed the present state of the technology was not fit for India, but did not cite particular issues.

But nonetheless, Gadkari acknowledged that the technology could not be avoided for long, although his government would resist it as long as possible.

This comes amid increasing global interest in driverless or self-driven cars. Auto manufacturers and tech innovators across the world are working on fully self-driven cars or driverless cars. Big names like Tesla Motors, Google, Uber, Ford, Audi have hopped on to the driverless bandwagon.

As a developing country, India lacks infrastructure compared to first-world countries such as the United States. Self-driven cars primarily need good road infrastructure and mapping system; both are far behind the expected level in India with pothole-laden roads.

But along with optimistic experts, top auto manufacturer BMW believes the fully self-driven cars will make driving safer.

According to a recent report by the Times of India, nearly 1.5 lakh people died in road accidents in 2016 compared to 1.46 lakh in 2015.

Research reports expect the upgraded car models with newer technology to reduce road accidents by 90 percent and traffic congestion by a large amount with the help of efficient driving.

Also, there is increasing traffic which the government wants to cut down by boosting public transport. The driverless cars have been considered by taxi aggregators, such as Uber, to be used for ride-sharing. With more users signing up for ride-sharing services on Ola and Uber in India, driverless cars can cut down on traffic congestion as well.

Legal questions have been raised regarding the liability of any accident caused by self-driving cars. Tesla, which has introduced cars with autopilot driving mode, has been put on the backburner after a Tesla driver died in an accident last year. The question is, who becomes responsible in such cases?

A year ago, Tesla faced its first car-crash death where the driver had allegedly taken his hands off the steering. Tesla CEO Elon Musk had previously warned users against leaving the steering as the auto-pilot technology was not advanced enough to render such action as safe.

But slowly more and more countries are adopting the technological innovation and looking forward to positive outcomes. Many states in the US, and countries such as Switzerland, Netherlands, and Japan have self-driven vehicles on road. If things go as planned, newer versions of self-driving cars--fully automated without the need of a steering wheel--will be rolled out on the streets with increased safety measures by 2020.

With cars on the roads on experimental runs in the US among other places, the manufacturers are gathering more intelligence to upgrade the autopilot systems and infrastructure sensors.

More and more automakers and technology companies are investing in self-driven cars.

BMW has announced its joint venture to develop self-driving cars with two technology companies—US-based Intel and the Israeli Mobileye.

The three companies got into collaboration to develop “highly and fully automated driving cars by 2021”, they said in a joint statement.

Elon Musk promised to build a self-driven vehicle under Tesla Motors by the end of this year.

German auto manufacturer Audi has tied up with Nvidia technology to develop the same by 2020, the companies announced this year.

Google has been experimenting with manufacturing of self-driven cars for past couple of years. It was the first company to facilitate a blind person to ride a self-driven car on public road in the US in 2015. It was a prototype of Google’s fully self-driven cars with no steering wheel or brake pedal. Google’s self-driving car project was separated from the entity and spun off as Waymo in 2016 by Alphabet, Google’s mother company.