Posted: 2024-06-19 07:05:35

Darren owns a Tesla, but what attracted him to the popular car brand wasn't what lures most of its fans.

Darren has quadriplegia, which he says means he is paralysed from the shoulders down.

It means others help him get around his hometown of Gladstone in Queensland by driving him in his own car.

But more and more, he says, they aren't really driving either.

"At first it was a bit of a gimmick, jumping into autopilot. You press the stalk down twice and they'll be like, 'Oh, I don't like this' and they'll be a little bit scared," Darren told triple j Hack.

"But after maybe the fourth or fifth drive, they'll start to get used to it."

Tesla's 'autopilot' feature is as close as Aussies can get to a self-driving car right now.

The technology uses cameras to see where the car is on the road, what other drivers are doing, and what all the road signs and signals say.

"We travel to Rocky or Brisbane quite a lot, and it's great along those roads," Darren says.

"But they do have to be paying attention because the camera watches you and it'll disengage if you take your eyes off the thing too long."

Autopilot is not a full self-driving technology. Rather, it requires a driver to be constantly ready to take over, and will shut itself off if it detects their attention slipping.

Darren says he's closely following news from the United States of much more advanced self-driving systems that can drive completely independently.

A colourful autonomous taxi with no driver speeds through the streets of San Francisco.

A Waymo autonomous taxi drives along a street in San Francisco.(David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

He hopes they might one day give him and other Australians with disability full access to the road on their own terms.

At present, he says he's often left waiting "hours and hours and hours" when wheelchair-accessible taxis aren't available.

"In the Gold Coast it's impossible to get wheelchair taxis, especially if there's any events on," he says.

"Often, taxi drivers will see that you're in a wheelchair and scoot around because they will get more money from a whole packed taxi.

"If there was a robotaxi that would just rock up and I drive my wheelchair into it, that would be completely game changing."

'Unpredictable' kangaroos a roadblock

Darren has reason to be hopeful.

Research shows self-driving car technology is constantly improving in safety and efficiency.

In fact, a paper published on Wednesday in Nature Communications found that, based on Californian accident data, self-driving cars are already much safer than human drivers in most conditions.

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