The federal authorities are only able to provide guidance here – the government is letting individual states have the responsibility for enforcing legislation and regulation. The guidelines do state, however, that the government will force recalls of self-driving vehicles if software doesn’t perform as it should. If a manufacturer doesn’t follow the guidelines “it will be open and apparent”, he said.
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The U.S. Transportation Department (DOT) released its Federal Automated Vehicle Policy Tuesday, detailing safety and regulatory requirements for testing and implementing self-driving technology.
Regulators and the industry see self-driving cars as potentially much more safe than conventional vehicles.
In an op-ed published by the newspaper Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, President Barack Obama said self-driving cars have “gone from sci-fi fantasy to an emerging reality” since he took office in 2009.
The document outlines a “15-point safety assessment” letter that manufacturers and researchers will be asked to submit to the agency explaining how the vehicle and its technology address issues such as vehicle cybersecurity and system safety. Less congested, less polluted roads. But he added: “We have to get it right”.
President Barack Obama himself penned an op-ed calling for more control over driverless vehicle technology.
“California is an example of the difficulties of regulating and how an effort to encourage and facilitate automated driving has actually complicated and in some ways impeded it”, said Bryant Walker Smith, assistant professor of law and engineering at the University of SC and an affiliate scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School.
The Michigan House of Representatives is now considering the legislation that would allow the public to buy and use fully driverless cars whenever they are available.
In an interview for NPR, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said that, as self-driving technology continues to be developed, he hopes that safety will remain a priority. States, he said, should stick to registering the cars and dealing with questions of liability when they crash.
“You can imagine how the California DMV would be struggling, with no technological background or engineers at their disposal, trying to figure out whether a particular autonomous vehicle is or is not safe enough to be deployed”, said Robert Peterson, a law professor at Santa Clara University.
President Obama does concede that government can sometimes get it wrong and take regulation too far.
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– Federal regulators want to require automakers to meet a set of 15 guidelines before they can place self-driving cars on public roads. It said if states do pursue regulation, they should base those efforts on the guidelines announced Tuesday.
