Ford, GM and Toyota Collaborate For Self-Driving Safety Rules (detroitnews.com)

Ford, General Motors, and Toyota have formed a new consortium called the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium (AVSC) to develop safety standards for self-driving cars. "The newly formed Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium in conjunction with the auto engineering association SAE International says it will fill a critical need by providing a safety framework around which autonomous technology can responsibly evolve before self-driving vehicles are put into widespread use," reports The Detroit News. From the report: Being able to advance the safe deployment of fully self-driving cars represents a new step toward the benefits the technology will bring, said Edward Straub, director of automation for SAE and executive director of the new consortium. Straub said the automakers in the new consortium would turn information discovered through their self-driving testing over to SAE committees every three to six months, and the information would be discussed in public SAE sessions as a set of guidelines are being developed.

Straub said other automakers and technology companies would be welcome to join the consortium, provided they have experience testing fully autonomous cars. The announcement of the new partnership may be a reaction to the inability of Congress to pass legislation that would allow car manufacturers to sell thousands of self-driving vehicles in the near future, said Michelle Krebs, senior analyst for Autotrader. "GM, Ford and Toyota clearly saw a need to set standards that eventually may become regulations because the proposed regulations, which had been moving quickly, have now stalled," she said. Straub said the automakers in the new consortium are operating independently of the efforts to pass legislation in Congress.

Comments

Re:That's not enough

[dgatwood]

It's a good start but we need communication protocols so cars can talk to one another and so traffic control devices can talk to them.

Actually, no, we really don't, despite the old guard car companies' near-constant insistence that it is somehow critical. There's no plausible design for an inter-car communication protocol that can't be forged, and if you can't trust the data coming in, you can't really do much useful with it, so what's the point of even sending it? It's not as if the difference between the few milliseconds it takes for a computer to recognize what's happening visually and the few nanoseconds it takes to decode the signal electronically is going to make any real difference anyway, in practice.

Also, traffic control devices had better be visually obvious enough that humans can recognize them, or else they won't work, and if they are, then computers don't need any additional electronic communication. It just introduces more opportunities for bugs and hacking.

We need uniform standards for road sensors, lane markers and broadcast obstruction warnings.

This, I agree with. Of course, making that happen around the world is about as likely as Tesla reaching level 5 autonomy in 2019. :-)

Not trusting it

[houghi]

Sounds like a way to make rules that will see that others are always at fault. The reason O think that us because it is two US and a japanese company.

It is telling if the company that gave up the patent for 3 ppint safety belts is not part of it.

Sounds like a health research group from the tobacco industry.