Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US House Panel Approves Broad Proposal On Self-Driving Cars (reuters.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the hands-off dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A U.S. House panel on Wednesday approved a sweeping proposal by voice vote to allow automakers to deploy up to 100,000 self-driving vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards and bar states from imposing driverless car rules. Representative Robert Latta, a Republican who heads the Energy and Commerce Committee subcommittee overseeing consumer protection, said he would continue to consider changes before the full committee votes on the measure, expected next week. The full U.S. House of Representatives will not take up the bill until it reconvenes in September after the summer recess. The measure, which would be the first significant federal legislation aimed at speeding self-driving cars to market, would require automakers to submit safety assessment reports to U.S. regulators, but would not require pre-market approval of advanced vehicle technologies. Automakers would have to show self-driving cars "function as intended and contain fail safe features" to get exemptions from safety standards but the Transportation Department could not "condition deployment or testing of highly automated vehicles on review of safety assessment certifications," the draft measure unveiled late Monday said.

26 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. So much for states' rights by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Consumers Union, a public advocacy group, said the bill needs more changes and must "ensure that automakers demonstrate automated vehicles' safety and don't put consumers at greater risk in a crash." The group opposes "restricting states' safety authority without strong federal safety standards in place."

    I realize that states' rights is usually used as a truncheon in the war for racist symbology (or worse) but I, for one, find it a bit chilling that anyone is contemplating forcing standards on the states in this case, especially at this time. There is absolutely no need whatsoever to do that, because in this phase (testing) there is no need to drive farther than can be accomplished within a single state. If you're testing a long-haul truck, it can just drive a loop, or if it's in some state that's so crap that they don't even have a suitable loop, it can turn around.

    It's not clear that it will ever be necessary to force states to adopt self-driving vehicles, either. If their concerns are actually addressed (this is a "union", right?) then it should be possible to get them on board.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:So much for states' rights by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      50 different laws and regulatory frameworks, many based on fear and conjecture. Sounds great.

    2. Re:So much for states' rights by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2

      No, this isn't testing; this is for deployment. They're allowing a fleet of up to 100,000.

      Think about the economics. If we deploy 100,000 driverless freight and taxi vehicles in America this year, that's up to 100,000 of the 3.8 million career drivers unemployed. It could be less: rather than adding 50,000 to the fleet, we could remove 50,000 jobs with a total 100,000 driverless add. It'll be mostly taxis in the beginning, because passenger cars will come before freight haulers.

      That's only 2.6% career driver unemployment, and .063% total unemployment added to the United States. The economy can remediate changes like this in surprisingly-short order (months or years, not decades), so it's not a big deal (except, of course, to the guy who loses his job--that's why we need strong social safety nets like a universal social security: that guy might get a job in 6 months's time, but what happens to his standard-of-living in that six months, and how many years will it take for him to recover???).

      You can also imagine it takes 2-3 years for the technology to mature, in which case the economic impact is even less.

      Now, imagine if we create a clusterfuck of competing state regulations blocking the efficient and profitable deployment of self-driving commercial vehicles.

      Ten years later, the technology is totally-mature. Taxi companies have sort of taken it up, but they don't like that the vehicles lose value so quickly: taxis are routinely auctioned off after a few years. I own one from California, and I'm in Maryland! The risk of loss of value because a consumer might not want to buy a California or Idaho or Maryland car instead of one legal across the U.S. is a big impedance to adoption.

      Then: everyone gets their shit together.

      Suddenly, the 235,000 taxi drivers are in competition with self-driving cars. Taxi fleets are dumping drivers left and right; new taxi start-ups are charging 1/3 of what traditional taxis charge; and nobody wants to hail a cab with a human being in it for $40 when it costs $12 to go in a driverless ZipCar. In six months, you have 180,000 unemployed; in a year, taxi drivers are a thing of the past.

      Fleet freighters roll in right behind them, and suddenly the 3.8 million freight trucks start going, too. Peterbilt, Volvo, and Isuzu have been ready for this, and their platforms are built to accommodate the hardware for their driverless versions. Driverless trucks roll out by the millions. Freight represents about 50% of the retail price tag of many goods in the United States; suddenly, it only represents 30%, if you get a driverless freight line to do your haul. Nobody wants to hire freight drivers.

      American unemployment spikes by 2.1%. It's an ultimate cost of 2.4%, but the economy's agile enough to start recovering already--a little. That spike is going to take 6 years to come down, and the pressure of recession is going to weigh on Americans yet again at 7% unemployment--a more-severe recession than the dot-com bust.

      Do you want to risk the economic fall-out of a mature technology creating a miniature industrial revolution from whole cloth?

      Nobody wants to risk that.

      --
      Support my political activism on Patreon.
    3. Re:So much for states' rights by GLMDesigns · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You realize incorrectly.

      States rights are an essential check and balance on the concentration of power. The fact that some racists took it up as a rallying point no more indicts states rights than a KKK or Final Call newsletter indicts Freedom of the Press.

      Imagine how much further along we would be if we, as a nation, respected states rights. You want weed legal. Good do so in your state. You think universal health care should exist. Good do so. Pass it in your state. That is the only way we, as a continent sized country, with a lot of different sides (it's way more complicated than left/right) can coexist without much friction. You want to allow women to walk around topless, allow anyone to use any bathroom, x,y,z. Pass it your state. If others find it to be a good idea they'll adopt it.

      --
      If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
      Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
    4. Re:So much for states' rights by skids · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Recently Sessions is on a tear to prevent states from banning civil asset forfeiture without a conviction by amping up the federal asset forfeiture adoption program. So much for Republican support for "states rights." Which is what GP is getting at: states rights are only a political convenience... when they disagree with federal policy because it doesn't let them keep the brown folks in the ghetto: "STATES RIGHTS!". When they want to beat up on poor people in blue states or do something to earn corporate campaign contributions, not so much.

      --
      Someone had to do it.
    5. Re:So much for states' rights by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      No, this isn't testing; this is for deployment. They're allowing a fleet of up to 100,000.

      When we're talking about the numbers from the major automakers, that basically amounts to the beta test. At some point you have to put vehicles in the hands of customers before you're really sure whether they're actually going to work in the real world, and that's the stage we've reached now.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    6. Re:So much for states' rights by unixisc · · Score: 2

      Interesting how one is for the 10th Amendment in this case, but against it in others.

      That said, I do think that Congress shouldn't be mandating things like this, that are better left to the states. Since the GOP normally supports sending things down, one wonders who greased their hands so that they would go ahead & do this. Particularly since a quick adaption of self driving cars would result in massive unemployment of truckers & drivers.

    7. Re:So much for states' rights by The+Snowman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It needs to go to the Supreme Court to delineate how state law can limit asset forfeiture on debts owed to the Federal Government.

      Civil asset forfeiture has nothing to do with owing debt. It is charging property with a crime so it can be confiscated: by the way, property does not get a day in court, it just belongs to the police now. In other words, it allows police at any level of government to be highway robbers, quite literally. Pulled over for speeding and your brake light was burned out? I think your car is being used for illegal purposes, so I am entitled to all of the cash in your car, including in your wallet, because that cash is guilty of being involved with a crime and it cannot legally defend itself.

      This has everything to do with a gross violation of the fourth amendment and nothing to do with paying debts. The fact that when people fight it in court the police decide to settle rather than go to trial is very telling of the fact that nobody thinks this practice will pass Constitutional muster.

      --
      24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
    8. Re:So much for states' rights by subanark · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The question is not whether driverless cars will kill people, but if they do so less frequently than human driven cars.

    9. Re:So much for states' rights by gnick · · Score: 2

      People already die in car accidents. The issue isn't whether people will get killed; it's whether this approach kills more people or fewer. You can say

      ...they're actually going kill people

      but if they're killing fewer people than human drivers would, we've saved lives.

      --
      He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
    10. Re:So much for states' rights by Verdatum · · Score: 2
      I mean, it's certainly a step along the way, but, self-driving does not mean "driverless". This bill has nothing to do with allowing autonomous vehicles to drive without a licensed driver at the wheel. That's going to take years. It's an inevitability but drivers are going to have plenty of warning to shift towards a new line of work as the industry makes the shift. I'm not saying that the shift is going to be all sunshine and lollipops, and I support programs that make it easy for people who's job is being made redundant to get grants and extremely low interest or interest-free loans to train for more future-proof occupations, but there's no need to full-luddite and start chucking our wooden shoes into the machine. Particularly once vehicles have swarming technology, this stuff stands to drastically reduce pollution, traffic, stop-lights, commute-times, auto-insurance rates, gas-prices, automobile injuries & deaths.

      100k vehicles is not nothing but it's not massive either. If they were to similarly do a slowly titrated rollout of the ability for unmanned vehicles when it finally is time for that, then that could serve as a potentially useful tactic to slows the labor-market shift. And even without that, the entire transportation industry won't be able to transition at once. There won't be enough new vehicle production, the approval process for new models will be slow; any retrofitting kit for existing vehicles will have the same problems. existing fleets won't have enough capital for the investment of new vehicles. Some companies will have a greater interest in early adoption, others will wait for the technology to mature.

      The sky is not falling here. As long as the skirted regulations don't present some sort of significant risk, then most everyone is in favor of this sort of bill; and that's rather refreshing.

    11. Re:So much for states' rights by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Since the GOP normally supports sending things down, one wonders who greased their hands so that they would go ahead & do this. Particularly since a quick adaption of self driving cars would result in massive unemployment of truckers & drivers.

      Yep. And this has to be aimed specifically at trucking, because otherwise, who cares if you can drive from state to state on autopilot? Aside from OTR hauling, interstate driving is a minuscule percentage of traffic. If an ordinary driver has to take the wheel while going through some crappy state, no big deal. If you have to keep truckers sitting around at an office near a state line to drive trucks through that state, that's a problem.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    12. Re:So much for states' rights by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The fact that someone's never been in an accident doesn't magically put them in a 0% risk bucket.

    13. Re:So much for states' rights by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      No, it doesn't work that way. These are to be sold as actual product, and you can't equate this to R&D through funny logic.

      Yes, it very much does work that way. It works exactly that way, especially in the auto industry. For example, right now Honda is selling (well, leasing) an unprofitable fuel cell vehicle in California (where the infrastructure is) and then going on to pay for customers' fuel . If you manage to use all the fuel they will give you, then you will be effectively paying something like $99/mo for the lease. Dealers will make a trivial amount of money, just enough to bother with getting the vehicle in the door, and Honda will actually lose money given the cost of supporting the venture and doing the R&D, but the R&D is what the project is actually about.

      The next generation of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Vehicle is going to actually be profitable due to a joint venture between GM and Honda to pool their knowledge (and patents) and build a cost-effective fuel cell. GM took the tack of taking their HFCV technology to the military with the Colorado ZH2 technology demonstrator program. Instead of commuter sedans, they built a handful of million-dollar military test vehicles. They're taking the approach that you imagine automakers have to take, while Honda is taking the other approach that they can choose to take. But GM has [in?]famously gone the other way on that, as well. Perhaps they're just a little leery now, when it comes to advanced technology vehicles. Regardless, by the time it's actually profitable to sell a HFCV to the public, Honda will be the automaker with the most experience with them.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    14. Re:So much for states' rights by swillden · · Score: 2

      Oh, I definitely believe that Congress is full of competent people. But I still seriously doubt that any of them followed your line of thought. If they did, there are a lot of other, more obvious, things they could be doing to ease the transition of the coming wave of automation, not just trying to accelerate one little part of it.

      No, it makes a lot more sense that the 100K limit was a compromise between Congressmen who want to accelerate self-driving technology development (because it will be really good for the economy overall) and Congressmen who are nervous about the dangers it poses. All of the public statements I've seen are consistent with this view, too, whereas I haven't seen a single one that suggests the bill is intended to ease the transition for drivers.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    15. Re:So much for states' rights by Whorhay · · Score: 2

      As implausible as that example sounds the reality is even worse. Countless people have had wads of cash confiscated because the only "reasonable" cause to have more than a hundred dollars in cash is obviously related to drug trafficking. Then there are the cases of homes being confiscated because a resident that was not the owner had possibly sold drugs to a friend.

  2. I see it's a return to the time before seat belts by H3lldr0p · · Score: 2

    and those other pesky safety features which literally saved the US auto industry from becoming another grave.

  3. Re:Who gave them the money? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    All the major automakers want to start producing autonomous vehicles ASAP, and I do mean all. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about commuter econoboxes or class eight trucks, there is immense customer demand for AVs. AVs are seen as the solution to reducing (some claim "eliminating") road fatalities, which is making them desirable to government. How plausible eliminating driving fatalities actually is remains to be seen, but it's difficult to imagine accomplishing it without virtually one hundred percent adoption.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Re:Who gave them the money? by jellomizer · · Score: 2

    Transportation is one of those thorns in the side of politicians.
    1. It affects everyone. Nearly every citizen in every social class is affected by transportation policies. This normally makes it difficult to propose theoretical partisan policies. Because if it fails, you are to blame for the failure.
    2. It isn't exciting. A brand new lane on Rural Route 7, is expensive, and can have a positive impact. However it isn't something that you can call on a big win. Because now those Semi trucks shipping across states are no longer stuck behind slow tractors.
    3. Success is neutral. While #1 means failure could hurt you, success doesn't bring any real political gain. This is why our infrastructure is normally just good enough.

    Self Driving cars are exciting, and has public interest. Success in getting these out to the public, means Congressman X is moving the nation to the Future. Much like how the Railroads, and Interstate Highway was in the past. Being that this isn't costing any money, it is a rather easy vote.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  5. Does Raise a Question... by sycodon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Who is responsible for injuries when the fault is clearly with the self driving car?

    --
    When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    1. Re:Does Raise a Question... by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Who is responsible for injuries when the fault is clearly with the self driving car?

      I think that would depend on what caused the injuries. If it was linked to something ridiculous and programming error (like it mistakes black cars for asphalt) then it would be the fault of the manufacturer.

      If the incident was due to a tyre bursting whilst driving, a maintenance issue, or something typically referred to as "an act of God" then the owner of the vehicle would be liable for any damages.

      --
      "That's the way to do it" - Punch
    2. Re:Does Raise a Question... by sycodon · · Score: 2

      If it is a software error, does the programmer go to jail?

      The QA manager?

      The CEO?

      Who should be held accountable?

      --
      When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
    3. Re:Does Raise a Question... by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2

      How much do you want to bet me that for the forseeable future, anyone dumb enough to buy a so-called 'self driving car', that gets in an accident while in so-called 'self driving' mode, will get stonewalled by the manufacturers legal department, who will fight as hard as they can to make it all look like the owners fault?

      This technology is being rushed to market and people are going to pay the price for that with accidents, injuries, and their lives.

  6. Re:Who gave them the money? by cayenne8 · · Score: 2
    As long as autonomous and human driven vehicles can be on same roads...go for it.

    But I hope it doesn't happen in my lifetime, that I can no longer own and drive my own cars/trucks.

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  7. Re:Regulations by skids · · Score: 2

    I'll put my bet down: This rush to market will result in no measurable difference in automobile fatalities. But it will cause a bunch of traffic jams and consequential economic damage. 5 years from now Uber/Lyft drivers will be making a significant amount of their income getting dropped off at a hosed up autonomous vehicle to get in and manually extract it from a situation it cannot comprehend.

    --
    Someone had to do it.
  8. Re:Who gave them the money? by DarkOx · · Score: 2

    A tyre bursts at 70mph on the motor-way.

    Possible yes, a computer with a stability control system that can apply breaking independently to the remaining three wheels, and also has steering control, stands a pretty good shot of safely slowing car and steering it onto the median.

    Brakes fail.

    Almost impossible, AVs will for the most part probably have 4 wheel independent braking. Almost all cars on the road today have two separate hydrolic circuits one on the front one for the rears, so you don't lose all breaks at once. A computer controlled system is going to detect that kind of failure and still be able to safely stop the car.

    A camera fails, or dirt on the lens makes it pass incorrect information to computer.

    Highly unlikely any AV is going to be equipped with a number of sensors. Its hardly likely enough of them would fail simultaneously that again the computer could not safely pull the vehicle off the road and say "safety critical repair required" obviously and AV is not going even start rolling if initial sensor checks fail.

    A human outside the vehicle jumps out in front of traffic and no time for car to stop.

    Yes! you can't violate the laws of physics; if I leap out onto the interstate no matter how good the computer control is you simply can't stop 2 tons + of steel at 70MPH on a couple sq feet of rubber in only a few feet.

    A deer runs in front of car from a bush that is roadside.

    Ditto for the most part but a camera with infrared range range can detect an object rapidly approaching the road way, that today could not be seen by you or I do to obstructions. AVs will probably be better able to cope with this than humans.

    Car AI develops sentience and becomes suicidal and drives into lake Superior.

    You need to put down the sci-fi novels and pickup a science book.

    --
    Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html