Driverless buses in Edinburgh: Would you be happy sending your kids to school on one?

More to the point, if you are a parent, would you be happy sending your kids to school on one? The buses taking part in the trial between Edinbugh and Fife next year will have human drivers on standby at the controls in the event of any malfunction, so there is no need to panic about a robot-created crash on the M8.

But you don’t have to be a Luddite to have concerns about the technology - after all it is only a little over six months since Uber halted its trials of driverless cars in the United States following a fatal crash.

Testing the vehicles on some of Scotland’s busiest roads - with their human supervisors - should go a long way to exposing their weaknesses.

In the longterm experts believe that the accident rate of driverless cars and buses will be much lower than current levels. While they will save bus operators money, but turf many people out of jobs.

One recent report suggested that driverless buses would be commonplace from around 2030, while Chancellor Philip Hammond predicted last year that “fully driverless cars” would be on our roads in 2021.

They are not fully here yet, but they are the future.