Copyright Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist

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Future driving

Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist, July 2005

The UK government are currently considering a new system that will link the car management system to the GPS positioning system. This will allow speed limits to be automatically enforced. Your car will know the speed limit for the road you happen to be on, and will automatically brake or ignore the accelerator as necessary to keep you within the limit. Leeds University, who have been running a trial of this technology, claim that this will save about 1000 lives every year. I very much doubt it, and actually expect that it will increase road deaths, not decrease them. It is a good example of over-simplistic thinking, which seems to affect a great deal of government-sponsored futurology.

When a few drivers stick rigidly to the speed limit today, everyone else gradually accumulates behind them. That means that when you are waiting for a gap to get onto a busy road, there always is one. You see a long line of cars, then an big gap, then another long line. If cars are prevented from driving at more than the speed limit, we will not get the bunching that occurs naturally today but will instead see cars randomly spread out. There will be few long lines of cars and very few large gaps. This will make it much harder to get onto a busy road, so people will be forced to take bigger risks, to go for gaps that they would previously have ignored. Additionally, people who are in a hurry will be strongly tempted to drive faster than they normally would when they come to a piece of road with a national speed limit. So we will see more cars driving at 60 on narrow country lanes where they would once have gone slower. The combination of these two factors will undoubtedly lead to more accidents and more deaths. Enforcing speed limits may be politically correct, and even sound like a great idea, but looking at the wider system in which they are applied makes it shows that this really an idea that should never be implemented.

By contrast, by 2020, a great year to be alive, we will be getting real intelligence built into our vehicles. This will take over driving almost completely and will allow far more cars to drive much faster, much closer together, with very few accidents. This relies on proper use of technology that recognises that computers can react instantly and cars will be able to link together electronically to allow their actions to be properly coordinated without the misunderstandings, incompetence and sluggish reactions that people cause. I can’t wait for 2020, but will hate having to put up with the misuse of other technologies that will be inflicted on us in the meanwhile.

Ian Pearson graduated in Maths and Physics from Queens University, Belfast. After four years in missile design, he joined BT Labs as a performance engineer. He has since worked in areas from chip design to mobile telephony. He currently works as BT's futurologist, mapping the progress of new developments throughout technology, considering both technological and social implications across the whole of industry, government and society. He spends much of his time advising on the major threats and opportunities facing us in the future, at conferences and in the media. He still dabbles in research, currently in ultra-simple computing, conscious computing and social trends. He is a fellow of both the Royal Society of Arts and the Institute of Nanotechnology.