CGTN Europe interviewed Peter Wells, Director of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University
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00:00Let's talk next to Peter Wells, the Director of the Centre for Automotive Industry at Cardiff University.
00:06Peter, welcome back. Given the stalling of the EV industry in many parts of the world,
00:11isn't it rather brave to confidently forecast that this is the road ahead?
00:18Well, it is, as you say, quite a daunting prospect and quite an ambitious prospect.
00:23I think there's so much interest and indeed hype around artificial intelligence at the moment
00:30and that's driving this interest in many sectors, including automotive.
00:35There will be a huge impact, but perhaps it won't be quite as catastrophic
00:41or as quite as dramatic as is currently being portrayed.
00:45Our correspondent Michael was suggesting that many of these AI features are not too far away,
00:50but taking a back seat to drive you to work is miles off, isn't it?
00:56It's quite a long way off yet and don't forget that it's one thing to put these systems into a new car,
01:02it's another thing entirely to have the entire fleet of all cars in use having all of these systems on board
01:09and that will take a very long time indeed.
01:11But also, think about this a little bit.
01:14If you've got a car fully running autonomously in this way, that car will obey every single traffic law there is.
01:23Now ask yourself, how often does that actually occur in real life when people are driving those cars?
01:30And I think you begin to see some of the issues here because we take a lot of liberties as drivers
01:35around the strict interpretation of driving laws, things like speeding, things like parking,
01:41things like where we can go at junctions and so forth.
01:44If everybody had to obey all the rules, we would be a lot safer for sure,
01:49but the culture of driving would have to change quite significantly.
01:53Peter, you sound like a man who jumps red lights, but it's a serious point, isn't it?
01:57Regulation hasn't caught up with the tech, has it?
01:59I mean, who is in charge when AI is driving?
02:02Well, this is also a problem and there's also a technical issue.
02:06Do you have the intelligence and the processing capability inside the car
02:11or do you essentially rely on being able to communicate with the cloud systems outside the car?
02:17And one of the advantages of the Chinese approach to artificial intelligence has been that it's less power intensive.
02:25It's less resource intensive.
02:27There's more scope to put it on the car, in which case the liabilities and all of the legal issues
02:33and all of the structures around that are much more focused on the car and the driver and the owner
02:39and less on the infrastructure and the rest of the system.
02:42Peter, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming back on the programme.
02:45Peter Wells, Director of the Centre for Automotive Industry at Cardiff University.