Automated and Electric Vehicles Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Lord Hunt of Chesterton

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, with regard to Amendment 1, the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, and I are in complete accord that the Bill is far too narrowly drafted. We have here a sizeable opportunity for the United Kingdom and one that is part of our industrial strategy, yet we are introducing a very narrow Bill for a very fast-moving technology, which will, as the noble Baroness pointed out, likely be outdated within a year or so, when we could be passing something which gives the Government a much broader remit to introduce rules and regulations to enable them to continue promoting this technology for some years to come.

I very much hope that we will manage to get agreement around the Committee that, if the Government do not table their own amendments to broaden the Bill, we will send it back to the other place with some widely agreed amendments which do that. It is enormously important that we take this opportunity because legislative opportunities are few and far between. It is unusual for this House to insist on the Government having more powers than they propose to take, but this is an occasion when we should consider that. I look forward to conversations with the Benches opposite to see if we can agree some way of doing that. I would be even more delighted if the Government were to come forward with their own proposals, but they have not yet shown any signs of doing so.

I hope that the noble Baroness will not press Amendment 2, because I think there is a large opportunity for level 3 vehicles as a replacement for trains on what are currently railway tracks. Let us imagine a large number of vehicles that will fit about eight people each running in place of trains; whether that is on the rails, which has advantages in terms of cost—both the energy cost of running a vehicle and the cost of maintaining the highway—or on a smooth surface on rubber tyres, which has advantages in terms of braking capability, meaning that you can run vehicles more closely together, seems an issue for the technicians.

If you used that space currently occupied by Southern Rail, in my case, on which the Government—because they own it—manage to run infrequent services at an average speed of 45 mph, for automated vehicles travelling at very safe intervals, perhaps two seconds apart, with individual vehicles stopping only at stations that the occupants wanted to stop at, probably travelling at 70 mph or 80 mph between stops, you would get a much better service. We would be able to get the Brighton main line back to the sorts of speeds they were used to in the 19th century; we might even be able to exceed them. For me, stuck down at the end of the Eastbourne branch, the service would be immeasurably better, both locally along the south coast and up into London. You would be able to reopen the second route from Brighton to London; the main route is frequently cut because of the age of the line and the difficulty of maintaining the tunnels—indeed, we are enduring two weeks of complete blackout this summer so that some work gets done on the tunnels.

There are all sorts of reasons why using level 3 vehicles—current technology—on the space currently occupied by Southern Rail would give everybody a much better service. You would not have to go for a scheduled train. There would be a vehicle there when you wanted to leave. There would probably be one leaving every minute. They would be faster and more reliable—because an individual vehicle, particularly if it is on rubber tyres, can just steer round your average cow which is what appears to cause the most frequent problems. You would not have these eternal delays caused by some minor obstruction on the line because that problem would no longer exist.

The advantages of this technology are known to the Government, Network Rail and other authorities. What we have all thought of as the disadvantage of being stuck with Southern Rail suddenly becomes the opportunity to have a really large network of autonomous vehicles, way ahead of anything else in the world and at a scale the rest of the world cannot match. It would provide a much better service than commuters and users get at the moment, probably at a lower cost, and a base for autonomous vehicle technology to work from in this country. I think it would prove enormously attractive to international business since it is very unlikely to be replicated elsewhere.

This is level 3 technology. You do not need anything more. You have a space where humans are not admitted. You do not need the sorts of capabilities a vehicle has to have to travel on the roads. Indeed, you might make these vehicles such that, when they got to a station, a human could take over and drive on. This technology might work. All sorts of things might work because you could try them as little add-ons to a large system. It would be much more efficient than what the Government are having to do at the moment—a whole series of minor experiments in little, confined areas, trying out different bits of technology without being able to integrate them properly. This is a really big opportunity, but it requires that we list and license level 3-capable vehicles because, even at this level, we need a proper amount of control over what is going on.

I like the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Tunnicliffe. We will have to be really cute in making sure that the software on these vehicles is up to date. One vehicle approaching another will have to know what software the other is using and, therefore, how that vehicle will behave in case of difficulty—such as a wheel falling off—so that they become predictable. To allow random collections of software, randomly updated, is just not going to work in an autonomous world.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, remarked in the course of her speech on Amendment 1, this Bill needs to be broader so that the Government can have the sort of powers they will need to regulate a fast-expanding industry, using as yet unknown technology. We need to give the Government flexibility. It is important that they have the tools necessary to make this industry succeed. I very much hope that this is something the Government will recognise in this Bill.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords, I was on the Science and Technology Committee and we discussed automated vehicles. After our session, I met some industrialists—people making and selling cars—in the context of automated vehicles. One of the things it was suggested that the Secretary of State might consider—it would come under Clause 1, referred to earlier—is that people purchasing vehicles, particularly those that are partially or wholly automatic, should understand the properties of the vehicle. There were some examples this year or last year when someone had a blackout and the vehicle took over control and moved them. So it seems that already some of these level 3 properties are not well understood by the people buying the cars. For some people, as I understand it, once you have paid by credit card or hire purchase the car arrives at your front door and off you drive. Even Tesla makes you have 95 minutes of training before you buy and use one of its cars. This is an area covered by subsection (1)(b) that the Secretary of State should be considering very strongly.