20, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued its regulatory guidelines for self-driving cars, in an attempt to help automakers prepare for the transition to driverless vehicles.
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U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said on Tuesday at a briefing for reporters the agency would seek to make it mandatory through the regulatory process.
A 15-point safety assessment for self-driving cars addresses issues including vehicle design, crash avoidance and even protecting the vehicles from hackers. Foxx says the guidelines move beyond the traditional USA auto regulation approach of reactive, post-sale enforcement of safety standards. Specifically, he notes that the vast majority of car-related deaths are caused by human error (94 percent of 35,200 fatalities in 2015).
The era in which self-driving cars are dominant is not far away as one would think, already there have been demands to implement rules for self-driving cars so as to bring them to the roadway as safely as possible.
But “in the seven-and-a-half years of my presidency, self-driving cars have gone from sci-fi fantasy to an emerging reality with the potential to transform the way we live”. Officials said they expect the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to handle the regulation of motor vehicles and equipment, and states to keep regulating “human drivers, vehicle registration, traffic laws, regulations and enforcement, insurance, and liability”.
“The quickest way to slam the brakes on innovation is for the public to lose confidence in the safety of new technologies”, Obama wrote in the op-ed. Recent news coverage of fatal crashes involving Tesla’s Autopilot semi-autonomous system has heightened the debate.
Asked if automakers and technology suppliers might deem the federal guidelines too onerous, Strickland explained during the press briefing that this is “a foundation to developing a good house-keeping seal” for self-driving cars, and this allows agencies “to learn more” about automated vehicles.
In this photo taken Wednesday, May 14, 2014, a row of Google self-driving cars are shown outside the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Obama administration officials on September 19, 2016, laid out the broad outlines of their plans to help get the transformational technology safely onto the nation’s roadways, saying the federal government should be in charge of regulating self-driving cars rather than states.
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The DOT made it clear that it can still recall semiautonomous and fully automated vehicles if they’re ruled to be unsafe. They’re afraid that the technology will take jobs away from taxi and truck drivers, and they’re skeptical that the technology will save lives as supporters claim. He also noted that the policy, and especially the model state portion, was meant to “avoid a patchwork of state laws” on the software-side of self-driving cars.
