Sustainability. Improving the efficiency of vehicles and reducing road congestion, which will decrease carbon emissions. As such, existing safety standards make it almost impossible for manufacturers to certify cars with automated features, necessitating the DOT’s new guidelines.
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President Barack Obama wrote an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette saying automated vehicles have the potential to dramatically reduce the number of people who die on the roads. “Here, we’re trying to get in at the ground floor”. Americans deserve to know they’ll be safe today even as we develop and deploy the technologies of tomorrow.
Companies that have invested in developing the vehicles say federal leadership is needed to keep states from passing their own contradictory laws.
The Model State Policy delineates federal and state responsibilities. However, as the field of the technology is still growing and changing, it’s expected laws will change as well.
Not surprisingly then, the first section of the DOT AV guidance is a 15-point safety assessment that outlines the best practices for designing and testing AVs before selling highly autonomous vehicles to the general public.
Simultaneously with this policy, NHTSA is releasing a final enforcement guidance bulletin clarifying how its recall authority applies to automated vehicle technologies.
“Automated vehicles have the potential to save thousands of lives, driving the single biggest leap in road safety that our country has ever taken”, U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who previewed the new rules Monday night, said in a press release Tuesday.
Vehicle performance guidance for automated vehicles. For example, the federal guidelines don’t require the presence of a licensed driver in an autonomous vehicle, while California regulators have moved to impose such a requirement. “The administration clearly heard the concerns raised by safety advocates and has addressed many of them”.
Until this week, the absence of US government guidance had left the state Department of Motor Vehicles – generally in charge of registering vehicles and issuing drivers’ licenses – to take the lead role in drafting regulations to ensure the safety of self-driving vehicles.
Henry Claypool, the wheelchair-bound director of the Community Living Policy Center at the University of California-San Francisco, called the Transportation Department’s assertion of its authority a “critically important step” to prevent states from adopting laws and policies that discriminate against the handicapped.
The guidance also identifies a basket of new tools that the agency could use – if they are granted by Congress. Congressional approval would be required to make numerous regulatory changes that are being proposed by NHTSA legally binding. Of those, more than 10,000 of the deaths occurred in crashes involving drunk drivers.
“We’re also giving guidance to states on how to wisely regulate these new technologies, so that when a self-driving auto crosses from OH into Pennsylvania, its passengers can be confident that other vehicles will be just as responsibly deployed and just as safe”, the president wrote. The Federal Aviation Administration uses pre-market approval processes to regulate the safety of complex, software-driven products like autopilot systems on commercial aircraft, and unmanned aircraft systems.
NHTSA said the reporting process “may be refined and made mandatory through a future rule-making”, but for now compliance would be voluntary. And if done properly, they say the new vehicles will save time, money and lives.
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“Autonomous vehicle technology, and specifically the driverless cars, can absolutely be a game changer”, she continued after the sirens faded. “But we do expect this framework will hold up over the long-term, and evolve over the long-term”.
