Is Canada Ready for Self-Driving Cars?

A few weeks ago I was interviewed over the phone by Rob Drinkwater of the Canadian Press.  He was doing an article on driverless, or self-driving cars and in his investigations he was told that he should speak to me to get a different perspective than the government one.

So he contacted me and we spoke a couple of times for about an hour in total.  Although I sought to explain just something of the breadth and depth of this subject, I managed to pepper the conversation with some statements to help reinforce the point I was making.

Well, with the government folks that he contacted not saying too much, Rob's fall-back was our interview - in which it seems he pulled out all of the emphatic sound-bites, and put them together in his article.

Because of the provocative theme, and it being a syndicated article the story was picked up by all the major media outlets in Canada and was published in some form in every major Canadian Municipality.

A few of the outlets that carried the article and their headlines:

• CBC: Is Canada Ready for Self-Driving Cars?
• Huffington Post: Self-Driving Car Technology To Hit Canada 'Like A Tidal Wave': Transportation Advocate
• The Globe and Mail: Canada needs to get ready for self-driving cars: transportation advocate

Hopefully, even though the article is woefully short on facts, it has helped raise the awareness of the subject and has prompted more discussion.  Certainly the number of comments and 'shares' on social media impressed me that there is a growing interest in this subject.

Of course the reader can probably simply replace the word 'Canada' and place your own country name in there, and the main point of the article will still be a valid question: "Is my jurisdiction ready for self-driving cars?"

It is my belief that the more that people know now, then the more prepared they will be when decisions are needed around this technology.  In my opinion it is already time that Governments need to be thinking about policy, and businesses need to be thinking about strategy.  Right now we are in the 'sweet spot' when it is possible to be 'proactive', but as the months go by and the deployment of self-driving cars looms larger, then some responses will start to be 'reactive'... which isn't usually a good thing.