Letters | In the driverless car chase, Hong Kong mustn’t lag behind
- Readers discuss the city’s progress towards the full adoption of self-driving technology, and road safety
Consider a hypothetical scenario wherein one requests a taxi on a ride-hailing app, and a self-driving vehicle arrives. How would you react? Perhaps you would be taken aback.
In the United States, autonomous vehicles have been involved in a spate of accidents. As of this month, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has received more than 580 autonomic vehicle collision reports from manufacturers testing the vehicles. These incidents range from collisions with buses to self-driving vehicles being entangled in caution tape.
Such incidents not only highlight the shortcomings of autonomous vehicle technology but also underscore the need for enhanced safety protocols.
Hong Kong has one of the intricate road systems globally, characterised by narrow, meandering routes and heavy traffic. Hong Kong also has self-driving aspirations.
However, despite the launch of one of the world’s largest public road tests of the technology crucial to autonomous driving in 2021, and the testing of a self-driving delivery vehicle around a local university since 2020, Hong Kong’s progress towards the full-scale adoption of self-driving technology has been relatively slow.