According to car manufacturers or large software companies, the self-driving cars are around the corner. What was still a science-fiction research field 15 years ago — my university had such project, led by AI guys walking bare feet and called “the crazy guys” — is now meeting massive capital influx, mindshare from top scientists and consumer momentum. Such cars are being tested live in real roads in California, and now even Switzerland.

But as always in innovation, there are adoption barriers, and they do exist for the self-driving car. Assuming the technology will ultimately work, the main remaining barrier is probably the law: in most countries, you are supposed by law to remain in control of your vehicle. This is a key principle for insurance companies to assess responsibilities in a crash. Easy to overcome, you would think ? not quite. For even technology-mature solutions that over-perform established ones may not make it because of regulations.

Side mirrors are an artefact from the past

As an example, every car has a artefact from the past which should no longer be here: side mirrors. If they had to be invented today, side mirrors would probably not make it to market.

Imagine that side mirrors don’t exist. Drivers need to turn their heads to look at what is coming up behind. A marketing manager identifies it as a customer pain, and asks engineers to find a solution. One comes up with the side mirror — but it comes with its own collection of issues:

• it will decrease the performance of the car, as it increases the air-penetration ratio. So, the gas consumption will have to increase, say, by 0.5L per 100km.
• it will impact manufacturing, which will find it more difficult to hold a mirror on the side of the car, rather than having a flat surface.
• Mirrors will break regularly, generating other sets of customer pains.
• oh, and by the way, there will still be blind spots, so you will have to put a disclaimer about how poorly it is addressing the issue.

Obviously the marketing manager will ask the engineering team to reconsider. Needless to say, small webcams would be much more efficient to solve this issue — as is the case for going backward in some cars. Some concept cars already support this solution.

So, why are side mirrors still very present in cars ? Because they are compulsory. The law says that cars must have side mirrors. And law has the single biggest kind of inertia that can be. From such regulation, e.g. insurance companies built their processes, defined ways of dealing with others and, ultimately, to cover the risks.

Side mirrors show us what could happen to self-driving cars

The side mirror gives us a glimpse of what it means to have a technology-mature solution that don’t make it to market because of the law. And this could very well be the case with self-driving cars. Actually, you can read more about what happens with side mirrors and regulations at this page.

With that said, we are not even accounting for the difficulties for regulators to certify self-driving algorithms (imagine Apple with a great algorithm, Google with another one, but when put together the cars end up making incompatible choices that end up in crashes). And once you find out how to certify them, which will probably a lengthy process, how do you deal with software updates every once in a while to fix a security issue?

So, it won’t be before long that you see self-driving cars : regulation need to change for this to happen and this typically takes a lot of time. Actually, we don’t even know how to even regulate self-driving cars. This requires to make choices about people’s safety, and this is the last thing that regulators and politicians like to do.