hello, this is bbc news with shaun ley. front first thing on sunday across the headlines. parts of central scotland. a muggy prime minister borisjohnson pledges night again, temperatures in the mid to fund a new high—speed rail route teens and fresher than it has been between manchester and leeds. lately. breezy across the uk, northern ireland writer for sunday, sunshine and south—west, brighter for scotland but shares developing we are here this morning to inject later in the day. hopefully sunshine some pace into this so we can unlock for the north—east of england and jobs and boost growth. east anglia by the afternoon. wales president trump praises and the south—west faring well in the second half of the weekend. top borisjohnson — and says talks on what he calls a "very substantial" us—uk trade deal are underway. the uk's biggest charitable funder temperatures of 23 or 2a degrees. 00:00:33,756 --> 2147483051:37:01,593 because millions of pounds 2147483051:37:01,593 --> 4294966103:13:29,430 in funding would be at risk. of scientific research, the wellcome trust, says a no—deal brexit threatens the uk science industry. the mp for sheffield hallam, jared o'mara, says he is to resign as a member of parliament — to deal with personal issues. riot police fire tear gas at protesters in hong kong after tens of thousands march through the town where gangs attacked pro—democracy activists last weekend. now on bbc news — click is in arizona,

self—driving car capital of the world. it's the hardest problem in technology and one that could change everything. this week we're in arizona, the self driving capital of the world, to ride in the latest robotic vehicles, meet the people who are not happy to see them... what am i going to do then? stand in line for food? ..and to find out what happens when the tech goes wrong.

when california told uber that there were going to be some new regulations that they needed to adhere to, governor ducey, in a public announcement, said... california may not want you, we want you to know that arizona does. we are a state that is open for business. welcomes business and new people and technology. our governor, governor ducey, had basically opened wide the arms of our state to welcome them there and it was a no—brainer. chandler is a hub where autonomous vehicles are growing and having more miles mapped on our roads than any place else in the galaxy. it's kind of great to be the centre of that. well, chandler, i believe, was chosen because it has very wide streets, very clean streets, they‘ re

on a grid, and the people would be very accepting of this kind of technology. and so it was that the technology that will one day change our society, our landscape, and our lives found a home in arizona. the makers of self driving cars have flocked to the town of chandler, which has fast become the industry's testbed. today, i'm taking a ride in one of the living types of self driving here, made by google subsidiary waymo. now, self driving cars come kitted with loads of sensors so they can see in every direction and sometimes in ways that we can't with our eyes. on top we've got loads of normal cameras looking in every direction. and the fact that there's loads of them means that they can judge distances by seeing how different objects move in relation to each other. now, there's also radar,

four of those, one on each corner, and these spinning things, these are the interesting things, they are lidar sensors. there are five round and a big one in the black bump on the top, which can see three football pitches ahead and behind. right, let's go for a ride. ooh, we have our safety driver. 0k. and away we go. computer: please remember to buckle your seatbelt. we've just pulled out in front of quite a fast moving car there. we made it. i call that quite a human manoeuvre. companies like waymo are experimenting whether their technology can avoid hitting you. i mean, that's the experiment. when you go out on the streets, when you cross on the crosstalk, and there's the waymo, waymo is actively testing whether or not its cars can avoid an accident, and avoid an accident with you if you happen to be on the roads.

and some people also are clearly offended by that notion. in fact, some residents have reacted very strongly indeed. check out this video we found on youtube showing a man attacking a self driving car. you know there's hundreds of thousands of people that see these cars on the road every day but there have been some folks who really don't like them and have tried to run them off the road with their own cars, throw rocks at them, one man drew a gun and aimed it at the safety driver as the car passed by his driveway. so some people really have a problem with this amount of technology sharing the roads with them and kind of cruising through their neighbourhoods at all hours of the day. but a lot of these incidents are not when the car cuts someone off in traffic or the things that would maybe make another driver mad at me, it's just their presence, it is just the fact that they're there that seems to really set people off and, you know, in some instances it's not even people who are driving, it's people

who are riding their bike or walking that throw a rock at them or run out and slash a tyre while one's stopped at a stop sign, so... frankly, i can't tell you what's going on in their minds. because i would never run out and slash someone's tyre, you know, for no reason. but there is just something deeply offensive about this technology and how ubiquitous it is in this part of arizona. some of the last three years we have responded to about two dozen incidents where people have taken some kind of action against the vehicle or the vehicle and driver, whether it could have been, like we classify, a road rage where someone may confront the vehicle and yell at the driver. we've had incidents of criminal damage where people have thrown rocks at the vehicles. we've had one particular incident where a person in the neighbourhood actually pointed a gun, pointed a pistol at the vehicle. probably the number one frustration is that waymo vehicle is being safe, being prudent, and following the law. and there are people

who get frustrated by that. so there are plenty of people in a hurry or go above the speed limit or make improper turns or whatever the violation is and sometimes people get annoyed at the vehicle actually going the speed limit and driving correctly. in chandler, there is the same mix of excitement and concern about self driving cars that we've seen everywhere. the difference is, these people, it's happening right in front of them, right now. it's big money saying, hey, listen, this is cool, this is new, i'm sure you'll like it because you see it. and it's fascinating. but at the same time you're costing people theirjobs and people who are taking care of theirfamilies. but you'd rather see something cool and be in this new age, rather than still care about the people that actually this effects. and we're lost if you think like that, man, you are lost. i absolutely would go into a self driving vehicle. i mean, i think that it's

such a cool experience. this is something you'd see on tv when you're a kid in like old 90s movies of self driving cars and the fact that it's actually here and at our fingerprints, i think it's incredible. ah, lyft drivers are going to lose theirjobs, cab drivers will lose theirjobs, and not only will they lose theirjobs, i promise you they will figure out a way to make machines create these cars. so they're not even going to let humans create the cars. like, do i trust a machine with my children's lives? i...i don't know. i don't know if i could do that or not. and, last year, the fears of the community became a reality. a self driving uber vehicle failed to detect her crossing an empty road at night and the safety driver failed to hit the brakes. it was the first case

of a pedestrian being killed by a self driving car. the uber was, the vehicle was a volvo again. it was a self driving vehicle. it was in the autonomous mode at the time. and our investigation did not show at this time that there were significant signs of the vehicle slowing down. the uber vehicle hit elaine herzberg at 30 mph. ——the uber vehicle hit elaine herzberg at 38mph. this was a huge moment for the burgeoning industry, which led to uber having to immediately halt their self driving programme. so what exactly happened and whose fault was it? we went to the site of the crash in tempe, arizona, with the news editor of the phoenix new times, ray stern, to find out more about the incident. ok, it's on the other side. she took her bike from this area, walked it across this lane, and then entered this lane. the uber vehicle was in this lane.

and itjust kept staying in this lane even though the pedestrian is here. it should have swerved. it had time and place to swerve, but it didn't. so before she made it to the sidewalk it impacted her. i absolutely would have seen elaine as she started to cross the road. and i would have braked for her. most reasonable drivers would have. and, in fact, any driver who was paying attention would not have hit elaine herzberg. in order to entice uber and other companies into arizona, governor ducey relaxed regulations, which meant companies faced no requirement to disclose anything about their programmes, including crashes. basically the governor invited uber in. that was one problem. they were operating here without any real transparency in terms of what they were actually doing, when the vehicles were in autonomous mode, what their criteria were for it. and so the vehicles were doing whatever they wanted. and uber had free reign. tempe police called

the crash entirely avoidable after investigations found that the safety driver was watching television on her phone at the time of the fatal incident. ms vasquez could still face charges of vehicular manslaughter. she looked down, they estimate, 160 times during the circuit that she was doing. the evidence showed that she was streaming the view, which is a tv show, on her phone at the exact time of the impact. so what exactly went wrong with uber‘s self driving technology on that night? it can't really be to do with poor visibility, can it? one of the messed up things about the whole incident has been the video released by uber after the accident. and if you've seen this video, it looks like this street is very dark and then at last second the woman on the bike suddenly pops out of the darkness — right before the impact. in fact, this area is not as dark as this video shows.

this drive—through at night follows the same route as the uber vehicle. it shows that the street lighting makes the road clearly visible far into the distance. the new york times reported that uber were not living up to expectations before the crash. as of march 2018 uber was struggling to meet the targets of 13 miles per intervention in arizona. as a comparison, gm owned cruise reported to california regulators that they went more than 1200 miles per intervention and waymo said that their california test cars went an average of nearly 5600 miles before driver intervention. reports said that the uber vehicle actually detected elaine herzberg six seconds before the crash, but the perception system got confused, classifying her as first an unknown object, then as a vehicle, and finally as a bicycle. those volvos came from the factory

with an accident avoidance system, one of these new semiautonomous systems that a lot of the new cars have. 1.3 seconds before impact, the self driving system realised emergency braking was needed. however, uber had disabled the emergency braking system on the volvo to prevent conflict with the self driving system. nevertheless, prosecutors have determined that uber were not criminally liable in the death. if uber hadn't disabled the technology that potentially the vehicle would have detected the pedestrian even without the uber autonomous technology, just with the volvo technology and stopped the vehicle. but uber disconnected that because apparently the vehicle was being a little too jerky in its motions and it didn'tjibe correctly with the autonomous vehicle system that uber had in there.

a safety driver supervising an imperfect system should ensure its overall safety. however, that only works if they're paying attention. with self driving cars being tested live on busy streets, accidents are inevitable. so this may not be the last incident that we see on the road to a driverless future. but the number of accidents involving self driving cars is very low for the millions of miles of testing that have taken place. if there's an opportunity to help keep our roadways safe, that's certainly our responsibility and our mission, to keep our communities safe and obviously our roads. so if we can reduce the number of collisions and people being injured and killed by leveraging new technology, that's certainly something we want to explore and support as we're moving forward, because we know that an overwhelming majority of collisions are preventable, they're caused by humans.

we're just not able to share in the way that these vehicles are, i don't have access to 10 billion driven miles, which in the future these vehicles will have. every oddity that happened to be disseminated across a fleet. i want a world where a fender bender in copenhagen improves someone's safety in a mine in cape town that afternoon, in a way that we just don't as humans. so in 2017, national statistics show that over 10,000 people were killed because of impaired drivers. over 300,000 people nationally are affected every single day because of impaired driving. two out of three people are going to be affected at some point in their lifetime across this country. and when we think about self driving technology, the reason why we are so excited about this is because if we can take that number of 10,000 people and drop it by one, 9,999, because of this technology, that is what we want,

and that is what we strive for. and it's notjust the added safety. there are many people who will be empowered and mobilised by self—driving cars. the biggest challenges for people when they think about giving up their keys and getting rid of the car and not driving any more, is that loss of independence. so self—driving car technology, for people to be able to maintain their dignity and independence to go where they want to go is tremendous, to not have to rely on somebody else. when you start talking about the senior population, that sense of pride and independence is very, very strong. so to try and take that away from somebody is a really difficult situation. we have large communities here where people have come to retire, and at some point they are going to need to turn in those keys, and be off our roads, so that's certainly a force. other people with impairments, whether blindness or things that would keep them from being able to drive.

if you have a hysterectomy or a c—section, you know, i'm sorry, you can't drive. there are just nuts things that are out there, because we haven't changed how we drive in 100 years. it's going to change, it's not ok. let alone the safety stuff. the mobility of people, the aged, the young, the ill, they want to stay mobile. autonomous cars certainly have the power to change lives and save lives when the technology eventually becomes reliable, and when it becomes socially acceptable. butjust over the horizon, there are other vehicles which may be driving themselves about even sooner. trucks are highway vehicles, and when they do stray towards populated areas, it's usually on the outskirts, moving from depot to depot. so unlike autonomous cars, lidar sensors aren't the key to these robo—rigs, it is these long—range cameras.

you might recognise we have two lidars on the system, but most importantly for our vehicle, we have a camera array, our primary sensors are cameras because this is a large truck, we need to see a great distance. this vehicle can perceive objects 1,000 metres away, well over half a mile from the vehicle. we also have side facing cameras which are used for, on surface streets, conducting unprotected left and right turns as a primary sensor. further back we have cameras that are giving us close surveillance of the lanes around us, that enhances what the lidar is also seeing, and we have cameras that are looking behind the vehicle and at the trailer. all of these sensors combined create a long—range vision system for the truck that helps it to detect the object's speed, trajectory, and can even

work out its intent. at 1,000 metres an autonomous truck could have up to 35 seconds of reaction time. and if you are expecting some high—tech controls in the cab — well, you may be surprised. this is probably the most important button in the vehicle. this enables autonomous mode. so when we reach a point where the vehicle is ready to go autonomous, the button is pressed, and off we go. now, these trucks aren't the largest autonomous vehicles being driven in arizona. they have some big competition. mind—bogglingly huge mining vehicles from the likes of cat and komatsu are driving themselves through huge quarries. an autonomous truck needs three systems to drive. perception system consists of radars, lidar up top, and then a positioning system which is an inertial measuring unit, a gps, tied together by the planning system to drive the truck. the best way to avoid an obstacle is to never get close enough to actually come in contact with it at speed, so pick it up at a very long—range,

and verify and correct it at mid—range, well within stopping distance of the truck. so how fast can we go in this thing? this truck is capable of going 40mph. oh, my word. we are really wanging it round the corners as well. it is not shy about cornering. once we are loaded it's a whole different truck. now you have 400 tonnes you are carrying around. right, and is the vehicle aware it's loaded, so it drives differently? correct. but the trucking and mining industries are huge employers, so self driving technology will inevitably lead to significant job losses. autonomous trucks are safer than human operators. a couple of reasons why. they don't fatigue, they do exactly what we tell them to do, and they do it the same way over and over. people is actually a pretty big cost in the economics, when you think about one truck running continuously for 2h hours needs 11.5 operators,

it is actually quite a large cost, you have food costs, camp costs, travel costs, so you are flying in hundreds of thousands of people every single week, that starts to add up. nobody wants to eliminate a job, we want to find a different role for that person. we just completed a run with the us postal service, it's a 2,100 mile round trip that we executed autonomously. self driving trucks are not bound by a human driver's hours of service regulations. a human driver can only drive so many hours per day and they must take a rest break. self driving vehicles will be safer than human drivers, they don't sleep, they don't drink, they don't get distracted. this is a crucial element of autonomy. since there is such a shortage of drivers now, we believe that this technology will be applied first to address the shortage. we think there will be plenty of opportunities for human drivers for the foreseeable future. so how do truckers feel about theirjobs being threatened by self driving rigs?

you ask any truck driver, they don't want to be behind a 9—to—5 desk, somebody telling them what to do, pick up that, do this, do that. if you're in a truck, eight hours a day, you're driving, you're by yourself, listening to music in your rig, you have peace. there was an accident in town with a self driving car, so how catastrophic it would be with a truck if something went wrong? what am i going to do then? stand in line for food? that's what it's coming to. and you know it is. i'm kind of sceptical, to see how is the safety rating is going to be. but i know they have already been testing it, and so far so good. it's not gonna happen completely and get people out ofjobs, no. there's always going to be human beings driving the trucks. have you ever known a machine that can go down

the highway or function right? they don't always work, it's true. no, it doesn't work. look at the accidents that have happened already. need i say more? but let's not get ahead of ourselves here. these drivers almost certainly have a while yet before theirjobs disappear. while the advancements we've seen in the last few years are more than impressive, getting a computer to fully understand the real world, and drive safely through it, will be a monumental achievement. they're not saying it's done, because it's not. this not a solved problem, it is a hard problem, it is many years before you can buy a car that has no steering wheel and you can say, "i'll have the car with no windscreen," and it has the same functionality as your car now. they will always have subhuman capacity and superhuman capacity in other things.

subhuman in their ability to reason, about all the extraordinary things that can happen on a road that has nothing to do with driving. superhuman in their ability to concentrate and never ever, ever get distracted. to see in ways that humans don't see with radar and laser, to sense distance, extraordinary things and above all, the ability for these vehicles to share and acquire competencies, not because of their own experience but because of the experience of all the other vehicles everywhere else in the world, that's an extraordinary thing and that is the compelling reason why these vehicles are coming. they will be better than us, because there is nothing in our evolutionary history that makes us good at controlling 1.5 tons of metal at 70 miles an hour. here in arizona, i've seen the benefits of — and the resistance to — the idea of the machines taking over another part of our lives. so i think the question is not if or when this will happen,

but will we let it? hello. you do not need me to tell you that the heatwave across the uk has now broken. things will remain fresher through this weekend, and on into the week ahead. also some quite wet weather to come for some of us, too, showery into next week. this weekend, heavy and persistent rain in places. thursdayjust gone could potentially have set a new all—time temperature record for the uk, 38.7 recorded in the botanic garden at cambridge university. obviously that is a very

important temperature so it is going to be closely verified, but a very different story in cambridge on saturday afternoon. umbrellas up on the punts on the cam. the reason for the umbrellas, a weather front which stretches from north to south across the uk, and it is only moving very, very slowly, in fact, hardly at all through the remainder of saturday daytime. the rainfall totals will really tot up. quite breezy across the uk as well, wet weather for the south—west of scotland, parts of northern england and into the south—east through the evening and overnight as well. by the end of the night, the front starts to pivot out of scotland into northern ireland, so scotland somewhat drier by the end of the night. it could be misty and murky with all the moisture behind the front. still quite a humid night as well, lows in the mid teens, obviously much fresher than it has been recently. sunday, and more sunshine for scotland will burn off most of the mist quickly, look out for showers in the afternoon.

a wetter story to the north and east of northern ireland, hopefully some sunshine in the south—west, the south—west of england and wales doing well with the sunny weather on sunday. hopefully the rain becoming more confined to eastern regions of england, allowing more brightness. highs of 23 in the south. then onto the week ahead and quite a deep area of low pressure approaching the south—west on monday, strong and gusty winds, particularly for coastal resorts and the low starts to fill and the winds weaken on tuesday and wednesday but with lighter winds, where we get showers, they could linger, so for some there could be quite a bit of rain around. a pretty unsettled outlook to take us into the middle of the weekend. you can see it is also much fresher with temperatures in the low 20s, perhaps a little more settled and warmer by the end of the week.

you're watching bbc news. i'm shaun ley. the headlines at apm: prime minister borisjohnson pledges to fund a new high—speed rail route between manchester and leeds. it is time we put some real

substance into the idea of northern powerhouse real. that's why i am working on. we want to inject some pace so that we can unlockjobs and boost growth. president trump praises borisjohnson — and says talks on what he calls a "very substa ntial" us—uk trade deal are under way. the uk's biggest charitable funder of scientific research, the wellcome trust, says a no—deal brexit threatens the uk science industry. the mp for sheffield hallam, jared o'mara, says he is to resign as a member of parliament to deal with personal issues. riot police fire tear gas at protesters in hong kong after tens of thousands march through the town where