On Wednesday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles presented a draft of rules that it will use to oversee consumer use of self-driving cars.
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Google plans to make its self-driving cars unit, which will offer rides for hire, a stand-alone business under its parent company Alphabet Inc next year, Bloomberg reported.
The draft regulation (summary PDF) also requires self-driving cars to be equipped with a steering wheel and pedals in order to ply on California’s public roads.
While the new regulations pave the way to wider use of the cars, current technology will still limit the geographic area in which they can travel. “Driverless vehicles are initially excluded from deployment”, it continued, dashing the hopes of everyone itching to hail a Johnny Cab. The cars have been involved in more than a dozen fender-benders, though the tech firm argues that they are being hit by drivers who are distracted and not paying attention to the roads.
Google is now testing their self-driving cars around Austin.
California rules-of-the-road for self-driving cars would have the potential to set precedent, and the proposed regulations were seen as sure to slow down the speed with which the technology would go mainstream. Public hearings and a formal proposal are the next steps, but there probably won’t be a final law for at least a year, he said.
Currently, use of autonomous vehicles has been restricted to trained employees of companies like Google, Mercedes Benz and Toyota, but the draft rules propose the general public be allowed to operate the vehicles.
In September, the safety chief at Google’s self-driving vehicle project, Ron Medford, said the technology is “close to working pretty damn well”. Company officials have long said they expect the technology to be consumer ready within five or six years.
According to the draft regulations, manufacturers would also have to put the driverless cars through a third-party safety test, regularly report accidents, implement security measures to detect, respond and alert a driver if someone hacks the vehicle and inform passengers what kind of data the vehicles collect.
John Simpson, director of the Consumer Watchdog Privacy Project, told us that California’s draft rules “struck a real balance between encouraging innovation and putting public safety foremost in mind”.
The DMV will hold further discussions with the public about the theoretical regulations in January and February.
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The DMV could then tackle regulations for cars with no driver inside.
