BMW said the question of who’s ultimately responsible when a car drives itself will mean no napping or reading behind the wheel for a very long time.
“Fully-automated driving is in my view still a long way off,” Ian Robertson, the Munich-based company’s head of sales, said Thursday in an interview. “The technology will be held back by the ultimate moral question on who’s responsible.”
Carmakers including BMW and Daimler AG are already adding partially automated systems such as an auto-pilot that can take over in stop-and-go traffic. In January, Mercedes-Benz showed a self-driving luxury concept car called the F015, complete with swivel seats to enable driver and passengers to face each other for a chat. Audi, the Volkswagen AG luxury unit, sent an unmanned RS7 down a track at racing speeds last year.
The bigger question, though, is how driverless cars will be able to decide between life and death, Robertson said. While a human can make a spontaneous choice in a dangerous situation, a self-driving car will have to be programmed to react.
“The technology is capable of doing these things in a much safer way than a human can,” Robertson said. “However, an algorithm will make a decision which might not be acceptable from a cultural or societal point of view.”
