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US Regulators Issue Comprehensive Policy On Self-Driving Cars (vox.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: On Monday, [The U.S. Department of Transportation] released a surprisingly far-reaching "Federal Automated Vehicles Policy." The policy attempts to do all sorts of things -- we'll get into the details below -- but the overarching motivation is that DOT wants to accelerate the development and adoption of AVs. DOT views AVs as a safety technology that could reduce some of the 38,000 traffic fatalities a year in the U.S., 95 percent of which are caused by human error. It also sees AVs as an accessibility technology that could provide personal transportation to whole populations (disabled, elderly, etc.) who have lacked it. The policy comes in four buckets: What the vehicles need to do to be safe; What federal and state governments need to do; How DOT will use its existing regulatory tools; DOT may need brand new regulatory tools to deal with AVs. The "vehicle performance" section lays out a 15-point safety assessment, so that AV developers and manufacturers know the sorts of things that federal regulators will expect. It covers everything from cybersecurity to data collection to crash response. And then there are "ethical considerations." AVs will have to make life-or-death decisions. The second section addresses the division of responsibilities and authorities between the federal government and state governments, and suggests a model policy that states can adapt for their own use. The feds will retain their authority to set and enforce safety standards, communicate with the public about safety, and occasionally issue guidances about how to meet national standards. States will retain their authority to license human drivers and register cars, set and enforce traffic laws, and regulate vehicle insurance and liability. There are three broad ways that DOT communicates about standards with automakers: letters of interpretation, exemptions and rule-makings. It is promising to speed up all of them in regard to HAVs. DOT is considering a range of new authorities that may be necessary to properly regulate HAVs. The report adds that "DOT has officially abandoned the NHTSA's own levels-of-automation classification in favor of SAE's, which is preferred by the industry. Vox has neat graphic you can view here. President Obama also wrote a piece about self-driving cars in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "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..."
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...to save me and my family from all the "excellent drivers" who are busy on their phones while speeding down the freeway. Some of them, no doubt, posting diatribes about Big Government taking away their right to maintain complete and perfect control over their vehicle's performance.
One area not mentioned, at least in Vox's summary of the new regulations, is smart road technologies. Here, sensors in and around roads would share information with automated vehicles, and possibly mediate information exchanges between vehicles. Once many of the vehicles on a road are talking to the road and each other, it becomes straightforward to: i) Route traffic around obstructions, efficiently merging cars into open lanes well before the point of obstruction. ii) Clear a path for emergency vehicles. iii) Spread traffic efficiently over available routes to clear or avoid congestion. iv) Organize "convoys" of vehicles going in similar directions to take advantage of drafting and traffic light priority. iv) Operate a marketplace in which vehicles can bid for access to express lanes or right-of-way. (Late for a crucial meeting? Pay other cars $5 each to pull out of the way.)
// DevsVult: The Machines Will It
You're right! We should ban job-destroying things like this. And the cotton gin. Combine harvester. Railroads (do you even grasp how many teamster jobs were lost to the railroads??). Steamships. Fore-and-Aft-rigged sailing ships.
All of those things cost jobs! Thousands to millions of them each! So we should roll things back to 1600's technology, and we wouldn't have so many poor, unemployed people!
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.
Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.
Okay now they are here.
Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars. Even Tesla (and many of slashdot regulars) point out that "autopilot" doesn't mean that the car can drive itself.
We've had the hardware to do self-driving cars for about 20 years now, and for the same amount of time very little progress was made on the software. We still don't have software that can drive a car in anything but perfect conditions, and even in perfect conditions they aren't able to do better than humans in perfect conditions.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.