Uber is stubbornly refusing to apply for a $150 permit for its self-driving cars
theverge.com
theverge.com
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes. I'm not saying that regulation is bad, just that businesses are generally anti-regulation. I'm also not saying that the California DMV should or should not regulate self-driving cars, just that the government might give them a pass.
Clearly its about the implications of the permit, not the fee to get the permit.
I also imagine light-industry manufacturers who welcome pollution controls would do so out of regard for people and families living nearby.
In fact, I think there's probably significant amounts of regulation that would be non-controversial to business owners, and not merely intended to "keep out fresh competition".
How do you keep regulations fair and enforceable?
Waiting until someone becomes poisoned and using the legal system to fix the issue just seems bafflingly short-sighted.
Regulation merely enforces your assumption. Common sense to one can be revelation to another. You'd be surprised how many cheap food outlets skip basic hygenic procedures, such as washing produce before serving.
If that is the real reason then maybe, but for instance where I live it is doubtful that that is the only reason. There are so many rules we have to comply with as a restaurant that blatantly point to protection of big companies that go under the name 'satefy' that I for one do not welcome them at all. 1% of those rules would prevent to sicken the public, the rest is just to protect big booze, meat, fish etc vendors.
There are a whole bunch of food safety regulations. Most of these are good, and it's really pretty awesome that most of us can purchase and eat food from a restaurant without risking sickness. It's virtually certain that without these regulations there would be a race to the bottom.
You may want to update your confidence. Most of SE Asia has no hygiene laws for restaurants and yet tourists flock and rarely does anything terrible result.
Why would restaurant eating be a race to a bottom? It already can't compete on cost with cooking at home.
Please cite your sources.
Either way, here's my offering to your noble cause:
lofty and ambitious, your claim,
but if to convince others, your aim,
a citation you must provide
to support your allegation,
else others will quickly deride
that your claim has no fact for
foundation.
Credible Hulk has arrived
his face full of vexation
with utmost confidence, he insists
if to convince others, your aim
for that grand of a claim
you provide at least one damn citationIt's pretty obvious there are no enforced hygiene laws in any of those countries.
My experience living in a developing nation with little to no sanitation regulation: people there got sick regularly and accepted it as part of life, e.g. "don't get the frozen pre-made food from that market, it'll make you sick." And they said that it's common to get food poisoning a couple times a year. So, not a weekly occurrence, but not all that rare.
(I was living in a former Soviet republic for a little over a year, and became good friends with several people who'd lived there their entire lives.)
I can't remember when I last had food poisoning here in the U.S.
This is the equivalent of Uber deciding not to pay its federal taxes. Sure, it could concoct a theory that the corporate income tax "doesn't apply to Uber", and in theory there's a possibility that the IRS might somehow agree. In practice, however, there is none.
The major difference here is simply that the penalties for failing to pay taxes are well-defined and severe, while the penalties for failing to obtain a state permit for autonomous vehicle testing are not. Uber is betting on the eventual penalties for their (flagrant and straightforward) violation of these laws will end up being something they prefer over making the relevant disclosures required by the permit.
That simplistic reductionism is not true. There are concepts of civil disobedience.[1] History has shown that many laws (e.g. copyright laws, sodomy laws, Jim Crow laws) are more like an ongoing dialogue/battle between the citizens and government for universal compliance. Other laws such as homocide seem more stable for straightforward compliance without controversy.
The DMV didn't write the autonomous vehicle laws -- they are interpreting it -- to their benefit. Likewise, Uber didn't write the law either, they are also interpreting it -- to their benefit.
Those 2 interpretations differ. I have no idea who is "more correct" in their interpretation. The DMV may have the last word and win. We don't know yet.
>This is the equivalent of Uber deciding not to pay its federal taxes.
No, the analogy is somebody disagreeing with a government agency's interpretation of the law. An example would be a taxpayer who disagreed with IRS and won the case.[2]
It's similar to one entity claiming that early VCR users taping shows were "breaking the law."[3] If VCR consumers and Sony disagree and say it's "fair use", responding to that with "copyright laws apply to everybody regardless" doesn't actually analyze the differing interpretations. Eventually, the consumers and Sony got the Supreme Court to agree with their interpretation by a very close 5-4 majority ruling.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/07/arts/design/tax-court-rul...
[3] Betamax "fair use" Supreme Court ruling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....
Should have just opened the article with this.
How do they react and get out of the way of an emergency vehicle?
It's also pretty likely that whatever framework develops to license the systems will address liability (I think by requiring the operator of record to insure the vehicle).
All precedent is that auto manufacturers are responsible for manufacturing defects that lead to injury or death, not the owner or driver. Even the term "operator of record" has new meaning in the fully autonomous era. Bottom line if software bugs cause injury it's the software writers that are responsible.
You mention many problems with human drivers. But software has been known to have bugs too, and the world is an almost infinitely complex learning environment. It is most likely that the safer future will involve the intersection and mutual augmentation of these two control systems, not the swift replacement of one by the other. As is the case for example with aircraft.
How often is the driver in those cases under insured? I also wonder how often criminal charges pop up for drivers that weren't being negligent.
As for criminal charges, the key question is whether a bad bug can constitute negligence. That will no doubt be tested in courts when lives have been lost.
What does 'fully insured' mean here? A sensible approach is to have liability coverage sufficient to protect your assets. That might be a lot more coverage than the legal minimum, but a large personal umbrella policy might be hundreds of dollars a year. People go bankrupt because they skimp on insurance, not because it is onerously expensive.
Not necessarily. Even "large" policies will not protect your assets from the worst cases where damages run into the millions of dollars, e.g. where you kill a family or hospitalize someone for months.
You propose that everyone with coverage less than "sufficient to protect your assets" is guilty of being "under insured". But there is no amount of coverage you can pre-determine to protect your assets in all possible cases. Not unless you purchase a policy with no upper limit -- but those are rare in the auto insurance world.
Thus, even if you have a "large" policy that falls on the high end of typical coverage limits, truly catastrophic cases often result in personal bankruptcies. Bankruptcy courts cap the payouts. There are no such caps on auto manufacturers responsible for accidents... unless they go bankrupt too.
I would expect many of the largest settlements to involve negligence like drunk driving or excessive speed (a system might have the wrong speed for a stretch of road, but it mostly will have accurate speeds). Of course there are also ways that a driving system could be implemented negligently that don't apply to a human driver (but I sort of expect the licensing process to address that).
You need only look up the average cost of a major hospitalization to gauge what the at-fault party is responsible for. They can run into the millions.[1] That's before we even get to tort damages awarded by a court for things like negligence (and you're certainly right that those can be even higher).
[1] http://www.rslfunding.com/whats-the-average-car-accident-set...
Also, I'm sure there are large claims. My contention is that there aren't a lot of them.
As for liability, there is already generally strict liability when products malfunction. If the product didn't malfunction, then that would mean someone else was at fault, and the cases where there was no malfunction and no one else at fault should be rare. Regardless, there's a huge body of law out there regarding product liability.
Once again, I'm assuming that autonomous vehicles deliver on the safety promises. If they become as safe as a lot of people think they can be, there will be so many fewer accidents that I don't think insurance and liability will be as big of an issue as they are now for human driven vehicles.
The answer is: it's complicated. That's why we have courts. We don't even have it sorted out for human drivers yet; if you kill someone with your car, you may get off without even a ticket, you may end up in prison for manslaughter. I honestly don't think robotic drivers add any complexity: there's already infinite complexity ;)
It's going to be some time before both of them are reality.
In general though, I don't think this is something that automated vehicles will have trouble with. Picking out strobing lights is pretty trivial for computer vision, and a couple of external microphones located on opposite sides of the vehicle would have an easy time localizing the direction of sirens even before the EV is in line-of-sight. I suspect eventually there will be some sort of preemption signal that EVs will be able to transmit that communicates their intended route to vehicles in their path.
I look forward to the day that I have a big ol' "get out of my way" button on the dashboard of my ambulance...
I think I saw a light change on demand in my hometown (Wake County, NC) for an ambulance the other day. It was late at night with minimal traffic and the light had just turned red ahead of me. The ambulance was between me and the light and the light immediately cycled back to green as the ambulance approached. I'd never seen or heard of this before, but do you know whether emergency vehicles are now able to influence traffic signals?
edit: apparently so - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_signal_preemption
One such article: https://boingboing.net/2006/04/18/man-fined-50-for-usi.html
By turning the light green, it allows cars that might otherwise be obstructing the intersection to proceed through it, clearing a path.
Also I don't think police are going to be too happy about a vehicle that is going to be probabilistic about pulling over. Nor would I really be happy about that in the back of an ambulance.
And this disagreement isn't a necessarily a bad thing; I think the regulation is unclear, and in such cases the only way to "clarify" it is to wait for the regulating body to sue you and have both sides present their arguments in court. (You can't just ask them to clarify it, as they have no obligation to respond).
Self-driving functionality, at least for the time being, is a tool used by a human operator to achieve their objectives with regard to the vehicle. This is distinct from a vehicle with no driver, for which regulation is obviously necessary. It's no different from a pilot using autopilot. If someone wanted to make an unmanned passenger plane, there'd need to be huge regulatory changes (not saying it's necessarily a good idea), but pilots use autopilot all the time without great regulatory upheaval, because it's just a tool the pilot is using to fly the plane as they wish.
So long as a human operator is in control of, and responsible for, the vehicle, it shouldn't matter in particular what method they use to operate it.
The use of "autopilot" in aviation is not without controversy, and there are a number of schools of thought on the spectrum between "it saves lives" and "it dumbs down pilots and kills people". FWIW, the FAA at least requires a functioning autopilot (or "automatic altitude control system") when flying in RVSM airspace, or the altitude where most commercial jets fly, so regulation is on the side of automation here.
"any vehicle equipped with technology that has the capability of operating or driving the vehicle without the active physical control or monitoring of a natural person..." [1]
Seems like Uber is right as long as their cars can't function without drivers, which is probably true.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/d48f347b-8815-458e...
As in not turning the steering wheel or pushing the gas or break pedals? Because that sounds like what Uber's Self Driving car does. (Even on the promotional videos, the "drivers"/testers are not turning the steering wheel.
> without the active physical control or monitoring of a natural person...
Its the physical control OR monitoring of a human. Ubers cars may not require [human] active physical control, but it does require monitoring of a human and so this doesn't apply to Ubers cars.
To be honest, I don't really like Uber the company all that much. But I do appreciate their irreverent attitude towards meddling bureaucrats.
On principle, would you give a bully your lunch money? It's only $5...
The DMVs need valid "reasons" to extract money. With human drivers, they can argue a database record must be maintained for traffic violations, a new license reissued every N years, etc. This is "plausible deniability", because there is no reason why it would cost tens of dollars per row in a database.
With self driving cars, plausible deniability goes away. There is no reason whatsoever. If the algorithm does not follow traffic laws, it won't be allowed on the road.
Another nice thing to notice: the DMV is double dipping. I mean, one fee for the self-driving car, another fee for the human behind the wheel, what a profitable operation! But why exactly? What kind of good services is it offering? None at all.
Self driving cars could mean the end of DMVs, and I would see that as a very good thing.
Edit: It's very slightly more complicated. The human "drivers" in the car also have to be enrolled in the DMV's Employer Pull Notice program (which is a separate pre-existing program that basically lets employers keep track of the driving records of their drivers), and I believe the fee for that is $5. So it's basically pocket change for the company.
The PDF that lists that fee is the Employer Pull Notice Application Checklist (https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/1c4c241b-70be-45f3...).
I can't imagine that $150 - even if it was per car, which it's not - even covers the overhead of ensuring that the company trying to test vehicles on public roads meets their minimum criteria. The requirements are pretty straightforward - following NHTSA guidance, insurance to cover injury/death, having a program in place to train drivers... this is the bare minimum responsible amount I would want these companies to be asked to do.
I respect and admire their attempt to "screw the man."