Would You Need a License To Drive a Self-Driving Car?

agent elevator writes Not as strange a question as it seems, writes Mark Harris at IEEE Spectrum : "Self-driving cars promise a future where you can watch television, sip cocktails, or snooze all the way home. But what happens when something goes wrong? Today's drivers have not been taught how to cope with runaway acceleration, unexpected braking, or a car that wants to steer into a wall." The California DMV is considering something that would be similar to requirements for robocar test-driver training." Hallie Siegel points out this article arguing that we need to be careful about how many rules we make for self-driving cars before they become common. Governments and lawmakers across the world are debating how to best regulate autonomous cars, both for testing, and for operation. Robocar expert Brad Templeton argues that that there is a danger that regulations might be drafted long before the shape of the first commercial deployments of the technology take place.

Comments

If "yes," then it's not self-driving

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

If "yes," then it's not self-driving.

Re:If "yes," then it's not self-driving

[zarthrag]

Simply this. To elaborate further. Self-driving cars should be the legal equivalent to sitting in the back of a taxi. Even from an insurance/liability standpoint, owning one means you're responsible/liable for fuel & maintenance - and that's about it. It should be down to the manufacturer to ensure safe, autonomous operation. (Otherwise, things such as self-valet and timed pick-ups won't happen)

Re:If "yes," then it's not self-driving

[Shakrai]

It should be down to the manufacturer to ensure safe, autonomous operation.

Thus guaranteeing that it never happens, at least in the litigious society known as the United States of America.

Aerospace is held to a far higher standard than automotive ever will be, with modern planes able to fly themselves from takeoff to landing, but we still expect qualified pilots to sit in the front seat and keep an eye on things. An autonomous automobile may well have more variables to contend with than an airliners autopilot. Children don't tend to dart out in front of airliners, the physics of air travel don't change drastically with weather conditions, and airplanes are built with more redundancy than automobiles.

Even if you can account for such things, how will your autonomous vehicle handle malfunctioning sensors? Aerospace has been working at this for decades and still hasn't figured it all out.

Re:If "yes," then it's not self-driving

[OzPeter]

Therefore, you either keep the abstraction simplified and require the pilot to do a bit more work, or re-instate the flight engineer.

Last year I worked on a Stacker/Reclaimer (EG the big wheely bucket loaders that either scoop up huge piles of coal, or stack coal into piles), and has an operator out in a cabin doing the driving. The same system was being sold to two different customers. The first customer wanted an automatic mode that would guide the machine around the piles of coal and scoop/deliver in order to get an optimal materiel field while the operator sat back and basically watched.

The second customer basically said "I don't want no damn stinkin' automatic mode, because if I'm payin' for an operator to sit out there, he better be working"

Re:If "yes," then it's not self-driving

[HiThereImBob]

Self-driving cars should be the legal equivalent to sitting in the back of a taxi. Even from an insurance/liability standpoint, owning one means you're responsible/liable for fuel & maintenance - and that's about it. It should be down to the manufacturer to ensure safe, autonomous operation. (Otherwise, things such as self-valet and timed pick-ups won't happen)

Let's be realistic. Self-driving cars are coming, but it is going to be a gradual transition. We've already seen the beginning of it with adaptive cruise control and self-parking. These features will continue to be refined while new ones are added, but we almost certainly face years (decades?) of gradual transition where our cars are some weird hodgepodge of self driving and user operated. The laws governing this won't be nearly as straightforward as you suggest.

Re:If "yes," then it's not self-driving

[kylemonger]

Forget about sensors for a moment: We don't deal with malfunctioning PEOPLE right now. Drunks, old people, and visual impaired people routinely climb behind the wheel everyday. We are already running over darting children, cyclists and pretty much anything else with the temerity to set foot, hoof or paw on the road. Old people ramming cars into crowds because they can't tell the brake from the accelerator are just the cost of doing business in a free society.

A self-driving system doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than what we have now when we scale it up. Given that you can give a driving AI the equivalent of millions of miles road experience in all conditions, I doubt that AI's will drive worse than human beings for much longer.

The insurance companies will need to be convinced for sure, but they will be when self-driving systems demonstrate their superiority.

Do pilots still need licenses?

[mjwx]

Do pilots still need licenses in the age of autopilot? Well yes because machines aren't infallible.

For a long time, an autonomous car will not be driverless. People need to get over this notion that next year a car will drive itself and you'll sit in the back with a Martini and the paper. That probably wont happen in our lifetimes.

Initially, fully autonomous modes will only be permitted on certain roads (think limited access roads like highways, freeways and autobahns). This will last years as engineers are even more conservative than law makers. The next step is likely to be special lanes on A roads. It will be a long time before autonomous cars are good enough to operate on a B road or suburban street.

Ultimately, because the law requires someone to be responsible for the operation of the machine it means a qualified operator will need to be at the controls whilst in operation. Same with a lot of other automated systems (such as long distance trains).