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Lawmakers Want To Move Fast On Self-Driving Car Legislation (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Members of Congress said Tuesday that they hope to move forward with a package of self-driving car legislation by the end of July. "We've got to keep moving, because again, this technology is moving away from us, you might say," said Republican Bob Latta, who is helping to lead the effort. That would move the bills out of the relevant committee -- but not out of the House entirely.
You do know that they aren't suspending laws about vehicular homicide and general liability with this, right? They're making a regulatory framework that allows you to have an autonomous vehicle that works properly, that doesn't stop at the state border and tell you it can't drive into Illinois* because Illinois doesn't have laws that allow it to drive you around.
If you never want to see a car that can drive itself, the best thing Congress could do to further your goals is to do nothing. Then we would end up with a patchwork of laws when every single state passes (or doesn't) varying laws making compliance impossible.
The action in Congress doesn't all of a sudden make autonomous cars work right, and it doesn't even define what "working right" is - it just allows the manufacturers to have a chance to succeed in the first place.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Those words . . . they are terrifying.
They're making a regulatory framework that allows you to have an autonomous vehicle that works properly, that doesn't stop at the state border and tell you it can't drive into Illinois* because Illinois doesn't have laws that allow it to drive you around.
Ultimately, you are correct.
That said, I'm not convinced we're at that point, yet, where we really need one unified law so people can autopilot their Teslas across the country. I'd rather wait and see what the states come up with and then try to unify from there.
I'm not sure there's a huge hurry here.
It does not work that way, I hope.
The federal legislators do not need to concern themselves with technical details of safety. They merely provide a legal framework for a designated body to set regulations. The regulations are set by technical experts, not politicians, and can be updated very quickly. They cover the design and maintenance of self-driving vehicles.
State legislation will need more work, because road-rules are set directly by legislation, and will need to be reconsidered. State laws also cover liability in an accident, or breech of rules such as speeding.
Does the US have any federal legislation for road rules? (i.e. rules for drivers, rather than cars - manufacturers etc.)
There is a huge hurry, because a lot of the software engineering for how cars operate in different conditions depend on the laws that limit how cars can drive in individual states.