Self-driving cars aren’t the challenge – proving how they think is | Tech Radar

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Self-driving cars aren’t the challenge – proving how they think is

Examining why AI struggles with reliable, professional decision-making

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The UK’s autonomous vehicle (AV) sector is entering a period of rapid acceleration. With London preparing for the rollout of driverless taxi services later this year, and regulatory backing strengthened by the Automated Vehicles Act, the shift from experimentation to deployment is becoming tangible.

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and Co-Founder of Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited.

That momentum is already visible on the capital’s streets. Waymo is currently testing its autonomous ride-hailing service in London, navigating complex urban environments ahead of its planned commercial launch. But as physical deployment accelerates, a more fundamental bottleneck is emerging.

The central challenge is no longer whether autonomous vehicles can navigate roads, but whether the industry can consistently demonstrate that they are making safe, compliant decisions in real-world conditions.

Without that capability, progress toward higher levels of autonomy will stall, regardless of how advanced the underlying driving systems become.

Recent incidents in London illustrate the challenge. Reports of an AV entering a taped-off crime scene in Harlesden, or repeatedly turning into a Shoreditch no-through road, highlight how unpredictable dynamic urban environments remain for automated systems. Modern AV systems already perform well at perception.

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Using combinations of cameras, Li DAR, radar and AI models, vehicles can detect lanes, pedestrians and hazards with increasing accuracy, and AV companies have now logged tens of millions of autonomous miles globally.

However, the real challenge lies in the transition to Level 4 autonomy, where legal liability shifts from the human driver to the manufacturer. To secure regulatory approval and public trust, companies must be able to explain exactly why a system behaved the way it did in ambiguous situations, such as navigating a temporary road layout, conflicting signals, or unusual pedestrian behavior.

This is where current machine learning approaches fall short. While effective at pattern recognition, they typically operate as “black boxes,” offering limited insight into how individual decisions are reached. In a safety-critical sector like automotive, this lack of transparency creates a major commercial and regulatory constraint.

Manufacturers and regulators need definitive evidence that systems are acting in accordance with local road rules before they can deploy at scale.

To bridge this gap, the industry is increasingly turning to knowledge-based AI, an alternative to large language models that uses carefully curated expert knowledge and structured reasoning to correctly answer complex, high-stakes questions.

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Unlike purely data-driven models that infer behavior statistically from past training data, knowledge-based systems combine sensor inputs with explicitly defined rules, traffic laws and domain expertise. Rather than relying solely on probability, they enable vehicles to reason through decisions using structured logic.

That distinction is critical in autonomous driving, where edge cases are difficult to predict and regulatory scrutiny is high. While machine learning remains essential for perception and pattern recognition, knowledge-based AI provides a clearer chain of reasoning behind vehicle behavior.

Decisions can be traced directly back to the rules and logic that produced them, making systems easier to interrogate, validate, and audit.

In practice, this creates several advantages. Engineers gain greater visibility into how systems behave in complex scenarios, helping them identify failure points and improve performance.

It also makes systems easier to adapt for different markets, as local driving rules and compliance requirements can be updated through the reasoning layer rather than retraining or redesigning the entire AI system. This allows manufacturers to scale AV platforms more efficiently across jurisdictions.

Rather than replacing machine learning, knowledge-based AI acts as a supervisory reasoning layer, applying structured rules and safety logic to monitor and validate vehicle behavior in real time. The result is not simply a vehicle that can act autonomously, but one that can justify its actions.

And the implications extend well beyond autonomous driving. As AI systems are deployed in domains where decisions carry legal, financial or safety consequences, the question of how those decisions are produced becomes as important as the outcome itself.

This is already becoming a defining issue in sectors such as financial services and healthcare, where regulators increasingly expect companies to explain how AI-driven decisions are made.

Ultimately, knowledge-based AI enables AI systems to incorporate defined rules and reasoning into their decision making, rather than relying solely on statistical prediction. In autonomous vehicles, this could take the form of validating maneuvers against traffic laws before execution, but the same principle applies wherever decisions must be explainable, defensible, and auditable.

As AI becomes more deeply embedded in critical infrastructure and public services, the ability to evidence how decisions are made will move from a desirable feature to a baseline requirement across industries.

The AV industry is often framed as a race to build vehicles that can drive themselves. Increasingly, however, the real challenge is building systems that can explain and justify their decisions in a way regulators, manufacturers and the public can trust.

Knowledge-based AI offers a definitive route to solving that problem. By combining machine learning with structured reasoning, it enables manufacturers not only to improve autonomous behavior, but to explain why systems acted as they did.

For the UK, long-term leadership in autonomous mobility will not be determined by perception systems alone. It will depend on which companies can deliver AI that is demonstrably safe, compliant, and auditable at scale.

This article was produced as part of Tech Radar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Tech Radar Pro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and Co-Founder of Oxford Semantic Technologies Limited.

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