I’m intrigued by what happens in the middle while we are transforming to a world of driverless cars. I’d anticipate that there will be a period where we’ll still have lots of actual drivers in cars on the road as well.

Depending on the occupants of the other car there are different decisions that the driverless cars will have to make. Aside from the logistics of every driverless car needing to know about the other cars around it; the literature I’ve come across is based on choosing the “best” option where both cars are driverless or at least the driverless car has the power to control the outcome. Personally, I wonder what laws and regulations are required or would be effective in the intervening period.

Likewise, do you think that different countries would make different ethical decisions? I have no doubt that they would which then raises the question of reselling second hand cars across borders. It is easy to visualise how New Zealand might control the import of driverless cars and restrict the country of origin but imagine for a moment a car is bought, sold or stolen in the UK and then driven from there to China, passing through any number of countries. If these countries regulate differently or have different ethical perspectives there is the potential for any number of incidents and accidents to occur. I believe this issue will be solved not by technology or governmental influence but by the desire of car companies not to limit the resale market for second hand cars to a specific country or region.

I liked the introduction to car governance. If multiple parties own the same car; how do you decide when to service or upgrade it? Companies today implement information systems and different owners of those systems have very different views about what is the required or an optimal level of maintenance. Yes it’s possible to imagine regulations and legislation which will cover scenarios like this but with all of these issues when does it become easier for governments to either ban them completely or leave the car companies to self-regulate and see how the free market works?