By now most all of us have heard about California breaking the ice by being the first state to allow vehicles that navigate without a driver. Talk about “Wow!” moments in history!
What I want to know is how CHIPs is supposed to treat driverless vehicles with just one human inside in an HOV lane, where single-passenger vehicles are illegal. Does the computerized driver count as one occupant and the one human the other? And what about those “dummy” passengers some Californians use to fake access to these fast lanes? I suppose they’ll become a thing of the past.
Seriously, though, we may be approaching a true pivot point in the automotive era. In case you think the driverless vehicle isn’t a candidate for eventual widespread adoption, Google has had a driverless car on the road for over a year. So maybe it’s not science fiction after all. And wouldn’t it be comforting to know that it isn’t our teenage drivers’ hands on the steering wheel when they’re out with their fiends?
But consider the implications for the workplace. With driverless vehicles in the fleet, we’ll be dealing with a whole new set of issues, from fleet policy to safety rules, productivity management and vehicle (instead of driver) training: Do we still collect MVRs?
What about accidents? You’re inclined to assume that if they happen, they’re always going to be the other driver’s fault, but is this a safe assumption? Are we still going to require employees who use a driverless vehicle to take safety training, and if so, what would it look like? Will risk management programs like CEI’s DriverCare have to maintain history files on driverless vehicles themselves, in addition to those on drivers?
Driverless vehicles may well be coming someday in the foreseeable future. If so, some day managers are going to have to get a handle on this notion and start thinking about the consequences. They’ll have to think about whether they should become adopters and, if they don’t, could it open the door to liability claims filed by fleet driversbecause their employers didn’t provide the safest kind of vehicle available? On the other hand, if a driverless vehicle is on a fleet’s selector, what might it say about the drivers who choose them – and those that don’t?
These are real issues, and they may be here sooner than you might think. It’s not too early for fleet organizations to start giving them some thought.