Feds preview rules of the road for self-driving cars

“What’s more, the quickest way to slam the brakes on innovation is for the public to lose confidence in the safety of new technologies”, President Barack Obama wrote Monday in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial praising the DOT guidelines. Not only would that depart from existing practice that has served consumers admirably, but it also effectively would grant the federal government a veto over new technology.

“I’m excited about the safety potential of autonomous vehicles and what this technology holds as its promise”, said Secretary Foxx. Some state lawmakers see the advent of autonomous cars as a way to attract technology companies and spur economic growth, and are proposing laws friendly to the technology.

Currently, the policy asks for automakers to voluntarily submit the safety assessment, but NHTSA is aiming to make it mandatory through the regulatory process.

“It’s in their vested interest to be as upfront and as clear and transparent as possible because there’s market risk to putting a product out there that doesn’t meet the expectations of the public”, Foxx said.

“If a self-driving vehicle isn’t safe, we have the authority to pull it off the road”, wrote President Barack Obama in an editorial for the Pittsburgh Post Gazette outlining the policy.

Model State Policy: “Delineates the federal and state roles for the regulation of highly automated vehicle technologies as part of an effort to build a consistent national framework of laws to govern self-driving vehicles”. “But we have to get it right”. That includes the beginning of plans for a new rule that would require all new vehicles sold in the U.S.to be capable of transmitting and receiving basic safety messages through vehicle-to-vehicle communication.

While autonomous vehicles come with the promise of improved road safety, there are also challenges to determining exactly how safe the cars are.

The proposals gave automakers and technology companies investing in automated driving many things they wanted, including a call for a single, national set of rules for self-driving cars. These guidelines will serve as a set of best practices for automakers to follow when designing, testing, and building self-driving vehicles. In some self-driving systems, it can be hard to understand why a vehicle made a certain decision, such as whether to brake or not.

The proposals touch an array of issues, from the ethics of robot-guided vehicles – should an automated auto hit a pedestrian or protect the occupants of the vehicle in a case where a crash is unavoidable – to whether self-driving cars should be allowed to speed. Foxx said the government will officially adopt the SAE worldwide standards for driverless cars, which outlines different levels of automation.

The president was writing in the Pittsburgh paper because the city is one of the first locations in which ride-hailing firm Uber is testing its autonomous vehicles. “We left some areas intentionally vague”, said National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spokesman Bryan Thomas, “because we wanted to outline the areas that need to be addressed and leave the rest to innovators”.