At least five years before driverless cars will be on Cork roads, says UCC expert 

As a new strategy for self-driving cars is currently being developed by the government in Ireland, a UCC professor has estimated it will be at least five years before driverless cars will be seen on the streets of Cork.

He added that Ireland-specific technologies will first need to be developed to take account of the varying road and weather conditions for Irish motorists.

A study by the management consultancy firm McKinsey found that the United States and China already have, respectively, more than 450,000 and 250,000 autonomous commercial rides per week.

Transport minister Darragh O’Brien has stated that a strategy regarding self-driving vehicles in Ireland is currently being worked on in collaboration with key stakeholders, including representatives of local authorities, the Road Safety Authority (RSA), Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII), and the gardaí.

Professor Gregory Provan, from the school of computer science and information technology at UCC, has published a paper which examines the impact that the operation of self-driving cars will have on a range of domains, along with examining the safe operation of these vehicles.

Tailored to conditions

Mr Provan said Ireland and the government will need to adapt any self-driving cars specifically to tailor the road and weather conditions of this country.

“I would say we’re probably going to see a phased roll-out,” Mr Provan told The Echo. 

“So, if you think about long distance trucking, when you’re on the motorway, it’s a completely proven technology and that could be rolled out right now, then the humans would take over when you got into the cities.

“I think what’s more challenging is driverless taxis that could operate within any city. I would say it’s going to take some years to make that happen.

“One of the elements of the project I was running was looking at was how we could transfer this technology to Ireland,” Mr Provan said. 

“All of the US cities where the driverless cars currently work are cities that have sunshine, pretty much the entire year.

“The Irish weather imposes significant issues. The definitive country is the US. But the road conditions in the US are very different to the road conditions in Ireland and the weather conditions are also very different.

He said that technologies specific to Irish road and weather conditions will first need to be developed.

“That’s the big distinction, it needs to tweaked for a country like Ireland. Like all things based on machine learning, it’s the environmental conditions that have to be trained,” he said. “Because of the significant differences, you would have to do a lot of Ireland-specific training.”