There was a week last month when Uganda Police recorded nearly 100 deaths on the road. While the country’s road death rate for that week (2.18/million) is lower than the global weekly average of 3.46 per million people, it is alarming and calls for action.
In an unconnected but related development abroad, a pioneering driverless Autonomous Vehicles (AV) company in San Francisco called Cruise returned to the road a year after it pulled its cars off the road last October following an accident involving a pedestrian, after thoroughly reviewing their safety measures.
Imagine withdrawing for a year because someone was dragged by a driverless vehicle, though the victim was thrown in the innocent AV’s path by a different, driver-driven vehicle!
In many cases, crashes on our roads are attributed to human error. Even the mishaps in driverless vehicles tend to be blamed on the human ‘safety driver’ deployed in the car.
Ugandans saw videos of a reckless bus driver removing a pullover over the head using both hands with the passenger-laden vehicle in motion, and another who was enjoying chicken drumstick with both hands, occasionally slurping at the sauce and making a ball of ugali mealie in the bowl, all the time enjoying a conversation of front-seats passengers with both ears and eyes as the bus speeds away.
So, it could be a better option to start deploying driverless AVs in Africa, after all, we have for many decades been using ordinary cars as AVs.
Yes, every secular African city has stories of famous drunkards who safely ‘drove’ home for many years while sleeping and didn’t die on the road but of old age in their beds.
The script of the story is always the same, with only driver’s and city names changing. Mr African Driver would drink in his favourite joint until he passed out after midnight. Bar staff would lift the guy, put him in his driver’s seat, start the car and off it would take him.
The stories continue that after negotiating many corners and junctions, the car would reach home, hoot and when the gate opened, enter, park safely and switch off.
Wife and children would respectfully lift their unconscious provider from the driver’s seat and carry him to bed. This would go on for years until he either died at a ripe age or could no longer afford petrol.
Since AVs make less errors than human drivers, it would be advisable for Africa to adopt them and save lives. However, auto makers abroad should design them for Africa-specific conditions.
They shouldn’t act like the USSR allegedly did in the ‘60s, according to an anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda story fed to many African social science students, that Moscow donated snow ploughs to Guinea or some very hot tropical country.
AVs for Africa should have good communication systems given our low-definition digital mapping, unsmart signal lights, gaping potholes, non-existent but paid for roads and many self-entitled big men and women whose convoys drive in the opposite direction on collision course with on-coming vehicles.
Our drunk grandpas who got behind the wheel around the time of the world wars proved that AVs are good, it is only our sons today who interrupt the AV mode and steer into trouble, sometimes killing themselves and innocent people in other cars.
In any case, many sober young Africans are already at the forefront of developing modern, electric-based automotive industries for Africa.
Most systems in such vehicles now being made by the few Original Equipment Manufacturers on the continent are automated and smart.
So, making the vehicles autonomous should be their next step. Let us also not forget increasing the electricity supply and stability, if the AV innovations are to be realistic.
That way, we should have less people being killed on the roads. Our dads and few grandpas who slept as their cars drove them home proved so.
Their only problem would come on agreeing to give a lift to another fellow on a different route from theirs, which would disrupt the divine vehicle autonomy, forcing them to revert to the human control mode meant for daytime driving.
