Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill — House of Commons, 2017-10-23
Topic: Transportation
Justin Piers Richard Madders (Labour, Centre-left): I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to the debate on this Bill, as the automotive sector is an important part of my constituency. It is home to the Vauxhall Motors plant, and last week, we heard the sad news of 400 redundancies. The site has built Vauxhall vehicles for more than 50 years and there is once again real concern about the future of the plant—I will return to that later in my remarks. In addition to Vauxhall, we have hundreds of dependent jobs in the supply chain, and many of my constituents are employed by nearby manufacturers, such as Toyota and Jaguar Land Rover. I shall focus on the impact on jobs—not only the immediate challenges for the automotive sector, but the Bill’s long-term employment implications, which I fear we are not going to address until it is too late It is right that we begin to address the legal impediments to automated vehicles and help them to become part of the transport network. As with all technological developments, we need to ensure that the legislative framework is in place, not only to keep our citizens safe and protected, but to send out the signal that this country encourages innovation. We need a simple and timely method to determine liability in the event of an accident, and the Bill will achieve that aim. The likelihood is that over time the number of accidents will reduce substantially as the opportunity for driver error is significantly reduced, but I am not quite as persuaded as some Members that that will lead to any dramatic reduction in insurance premiums I imagine The Highway Code will have to be reviewed in due course, and although we are addressing civil liability in this debate, we may in due course have to consider changes to criminal law. At what point does the occupant—I use that term rather than "driver-operator"—cease to be personally liable for any breaches of criminal law? Will we need new offences to take account of the consequences of deliberate hacking I have read the lengthy discussions about software updates from the debates on the Bill’s previous incarnation, and I must say that I am not at all clear about where responsibility would lie if a vehicle did not have the required software updates. Should that be looked into in the context of MOT certificates? We are used to regular updates for consumer products such as phones—in fact, that is part of the manufacturers’ business model, to encourage us to buy new phones every few years—but a car is a rather different proposition. A balance needs to be struck between public safety and consumer rights. I do not want to see a £30,000 vehicle becoming unuseable because the owner refuses to pay what they consider to be an extortionate cost for a software update We need to consider the broader issue of value judgments. In all the films about artificial intelligence—in which, of course, most of the time things go wrong—machines usually have some sort of in-built fail-safe that prevents them from doing harm to humans. One can see how that idea could be transferred to an autonomous vehicle’s operating system, but it is inevitable that there will be occasions on which evasive action might prevent harm from being done to the passenger but could cause injury or worse to a pedestrian. Earlier in the debate, my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham (Clive Efford) gave an example of how such circumstances might arise We in the House of Commons need to have a view on what happens if a car swerves off the road to avoid hitting another vehicle but, in doing so, hits a pedestrian on the pavement. I am not comfortable subcontracting that kind of value judgment to a software developer, and I am even less comfortable subcontracting it to some kind of machine that learns through trial and error which decisions to take. Of course, we humans will not have clear sight of how such machines make those decisions, and we might not be able to understand anyway. I was less than reassured by the Minister’s response to my hon. Friend the Member for Eltham. I suspect it would not be straightforward to put something of that nature into the Bill, and it is probably a few years before that kind of dilemma becomes relevant, but we do need to consider now how Parliament can ensure transparency and accountability for what could potentially be life and death decisions I have given some general observations on the kind of moral and legal questions we need to consider in the context of the Bill, but the main issue I wish to address is the Bill’s effects on employment, both good and bad. I know that the Government are looking to make the country a world leader in both automated and battery vehicle technology with initiatives such as the Faraday challenge, but I am concerned that although we will be a market leader in developing the technologies, our economy will not feel the full benefit of them because the mass manufacture of new vehicles will take place elsewhere. Dyson is a good example: it currently employs hundreds of people in this country to develop its own electric vehicle, which is of course a positive development, but so far it has not made any commitment to manufacture that product, when it is finalised, on these shores. Of course, Dyson has form in this area.