“We have points on Australia that are fixed to Australia and the lines of latitude and longitude move with those points,” Dan Jaksa from Geoscience Australia, the national agency for geoscience research and geospatial information, told ABC. “The lines are fixed to the continent but as time goes by, that position compared to a GPS position can create a difference, so every so often we need to change that.”
“Around the corner, in the not too distant future, we are going to have possibly driverless cars or at least autonomous vehicles where, 1.5 meters, well, you’re in the middle of the road or you’re in another lane,” Jaksa continued. “Quite frankly, we need to update the datum if they're going to become a reality.”
The update to the local coordinate system will overshoot by 7.8 inches to account for more movement and predict where the continent will be in 2020.