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US Consumer Groups Warn 'Robot Car Bill' Threatens Safety (consumerreports.org)
"If you don't place a Capable Engineering crew to oversee a project that involves lives, you're asking for trouble," writes Slashdot reader Neuronwelder. Consumer Reports writes:
Congress is moving ahead with plans to let self-driving cars be tested on U.S. roads without having to comply with the same safety rules as regular vehicles... The House passed its version of the legislation earlier this month with little opposition. The Senate is expected to vote on its bill in the coming weeks... "Federal law shouldn't leave consumers as guinea pigs," said William Wallace, policy analyst for Consumers Union. "We were hopeful that this bill would include much stronger measures to protect consumers against known emerging safety risks. Unfortunately, in the bill's current form, it doesn't."
The legislation, which would take effect in 18 months, would allow the deployment of up to 50,000 self-driving vehicles per company in the first year of its application, rising to 100,000 vehicles annually by the third year, exempt from essential federal safety standards... Automakers might be able to go beyond the limits by getting exemptions for more than one model. The bill also creates a means to go beyond 100,000 cars for each company, by allowing automakers to petition the NHTSA after five years for more vehicles.
"The bill pre-empts any state safety standards," argues the group Consumer Watchdog, "but there are none yet in place at the national level."
The legislation, which would take effect in 18 months, would allow the deployment of up to 50,000 self-driving vehicles per company in the first year of its application, rising to 100,000 vehicles annually by the third year, exempt from essential federal safety standards... Automakers might be able to go beyond the limits by getting exemptions for more than one model. The bill also creates a means to go beyond 100,000 cars for each company, by allowing automakers to petition the NHTSA after five years for more vehicles.
"The bill pre-empts any state safety standards," argues the group Consumer Watchdog, "but there are none yet in place at the national level."
The thing is, currently 50,000 people a year die on American roads. Even if self-driving cars could reduce that number 99%, rather than getting credit for saving 49,500 people a year, these car companies would be ripped apart for "murdering" 500 people a year. Rather than winning accolades for saving 10's of thousands of lives, they'd be sued for hundreds of millions a year for those hundreds of deaths.
You need legislation to prevent that kind of liability, and it will save many, many lives. It just won't save everyone.
The US road transportation system kills ~40k people per year and maims many more. To put that in perspective that's the equivalent of about 300 airplane crashes per year and yet it doesn't really make the news. Every car that is currently sold is threat to those same groups - humans as drivers are absolutely the worst. Some worse than others,but none are perfect. I suspect that any technology that will be deployed would be, statistically, safer than human drivers. So deploying the technology when it has matured a little more has the immediate prospect of reducing overall death rate, however that doesn't help the individual. It's a difficult problem because statistics don't matter if it's your loved one has been killed and yet we accept this of human drivers. Expecting to go from 40k to zero deaths just by deploying autonomous technology is unrealistic. Where's the cut off, 10k deaths (saving 30k lives per year), 1000 deaths, 100???
[Rumsfled] But it's a known unknown.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is a poorly written article. There is no mention, except for lack of steering wheel, of the rules self driving cars don't have to follow. If you are getting up in arms over this, at least point out the problem.