U.S. House approves proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars
reuters.com
reuters.com
This was a news story in itself [1]. It was attributed to increased driving, encouraged by economic factors such as higher employment and lower gas prices.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/02/18/467230965/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
In its own early estimates that were released late in 2015, NHTSA reported seeing a 3.5 percent rise in vehicle miles traveled in the U.S. But it also said the fatality rate — the number of deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled — was rising at a slightly higher pace of 4.4 percent.
Interesting - I always assumed that the increase in road deaths was at least largely due to increased cellphone usage, resulting in distracted drivers.
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/16/business/tech-distract...
Florida and Georgia combined saw a +190 drunk driving fatalities in the same period.
EDIT: found a more specific report about electronic device usage: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
[0]: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
For those who don't remember: Uber was clearly experimenting with unready software on the roads with insufficient safety processes in place. When caught on camera running a red light, Uber blamed the human operator and weasel-worded their pr statement to imply that the car was not in autonomous mode. It in fact was in autonomous mode, and the driver was in observation mode. It's unclear if the failure was due to observer attention failure or lack of training.
Page 2: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF00/20170727/106347/BILLS...
As you said, how can they effectively legislate something that is not even fully fleshed out yet? Is this really the time to centralize legislation at the federal level and block states?
The primary benefit of allowing states to do it instead is that you can have more liberal experimentation in places where it makes more sense, like less dense, deserty Nevada, with lots of freeways. While more densely populated highly urbanized parts of the country can be avoided until it's ready.
I can't believe they are selling this as 'speeding the deployment' because it would be 10x easier for tech companies to convince a state/local government than the federal one. And it seems they already convinced a few states already...
The only thing I can imagine this is "speeding up" is helping the major auto companies minimize their legal costs and allow them to focus on lobbying one level of government. As well as making it easier for these companies to guide the legislation towards their favour. This is how corporatism works in the US. The legislation is designed with big-co's in mind who have teams of lawyers and lobbyists.
You and I both know that without premarket approval, one or more companies are going to get careless and are going to kill people before the technology is ready. It's going to stain public acceptance for a quite necessary technology.
Here's a new medicine we're developing! It's gonna totally work great. The science says it's possible, we just need to work out the kinks while treating hundreds of thousands of people....
Also, 3,000 people die every month on U.S. roads, your medicine analogy is wrong because there is much harm from the current system.
Assume self-driving cars exist at some point. Assume they reduce fatalities by 90 percent. Ignore injuries. Now "only" 3,000 people are being killed by autonomous vehicles because "Hey, software isn't perfect and stuff happens." How many consumer products today kill that many people a year and the public is basically OK with it?
I'm not saying that the companies shouldn't make reasonable payments as a cost of doing business but if Ford manufacturing defects today were to kill 1,000 people a year they'd be sued out of existence.
What can happen is if suddenly there's a race to market that throws process off the rails or a risk factor that was dismissed because of particulars of the culture that is producing the vehicles. That's where an outside inspector and premarket approval really helps.
However, i can imagine a set of guideliness adopted into industry which involves slow rollouts of updates (potentially in a multivariate testing manner controlling for speed variance/distribution, response time, collision proximity (?) or collisions avoided, distance traveled, user comfort score, and so on. In other words, due diligence must be done, before rolling out new releases.
The insurance companies.
Only now, these insurance companies will be paying 1/4th the amount of money they were before, because of the reduced number of accidents.
It would save the insurance companies billions of dollars to do this, as it would encourage their drivers to stay in self driving mode which will be way safer.
Punitive damages are another story, but in theory they're not available in cases of ordinary negligence.
If my self driving Subaru causes an accident, I think Subaru will pay for the damages. And Subaru doesn't need to involve an insurance company in that transaction.
The manufacturer simply has to state that while the software is in control and you are sitting idle, you must continue to pay attention and re-take control if anything goes awry.
In the event of an accident, the manufacturer can then state that the accident would not have occurred if the driver had maintained control as the T&Cs demanded and wash their hands of responsibility in some PR friendly way.
Then it is not a self-driving car. There's definitely a point where cars will be nominally just assistive driving under some set of circumstances but people won't pay attention because they normally don't need to.
This is one of the things that will need to be worked out as the tech gets better over time. Liability is a big deal. If the car is billed as fully self-driving, the driver really can't be held responsible (both criminally and civilly) if their car runs over someone. (And it will.)
Which insurance company, under whose policy? That's the question. It makes a big difference to the people involved, because it affects the policies they buy and how much they cost.
An insurance company would likely offer to cover all self driving accidents for free. This is because it would be a small cost to them, and would encourage you to use the self driving mode more often, which would cause you to get in less accidents.
Why WOULDN'T an insurance company cover all this stuff for free? It literally would save them billions.
The federal pre-emptions to state regulations was expected. States cannot have any higher standards than the federal ones, except for the vehicles that the states purchase for their own needs.
> No State or political subdivision of a State may maintain, enforce, prescribe, or continue in effect any law or regulation regarding the design, construction, or performance of highly automated vehicles, automated driving systems, or components of automated driving systems unless such law or regulation is identical to a standard prescribed under this chapter.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3388...
According to Wired, there are 21 states with some form of regulation of self-driving vehicles.
> Self-driving vehicles have been testing on public roads since 2010, when Google hit the streets near Mountain View, California. And in the absence of congressional oversight, states have stepped in to regulate them, creating a patchwork of at least 21 different state laws and guidelines with different purposes, definitions, and priorities. This is a serious pain for the growing self-driving industry, which aspires to build cars permitted on all public roads.
https://www.wired.com/story/congress-self-driving-car-law-bi...
What happened to the states being policy laboratories? I thought Republicans were for local control? Or is that only for school textbooks and baking wedding cakes.
Not the lives of the people who would have been saved by safety features in a car they weren't driving because they couldn't afford it or because the implementation of a particular safety feature was a lower priority than the implementing a second variant of emissions equipment and calibration.
Stuff like this is fairly zero sum.
>What happened to the states being policy laboratories
The federal government could implement this as a FMVSS if they wanted.
Neither party has a monopoly on saying one thing and doing another.
IOW, similar to, or in addition to, the FMVSS, will manufacturers have a series of regulations that define the minimum requirements of objective performance criteria for cars sold as "self-driving"? If so, what would those criteria be? Will there be software source code audits to exhibit that the software wasn't written specifically for the testing (vis-a-vis VW)? Finally, will superior test results become marketing fodder for manufacturers in the way acceleration and cornering are now?
‘‘§ 30129. Updated or new motor vehicle safety stand- 10 ards for highly automated vehicles 11 ‘‘(a) SAFETY ASSESSMENT CERTIFICATION.— 12 ‘‘(1) FINAL RULE.—Not later than 24 months 13 after the date of the enactment of this section, the 14 Secretary of Transportation shall issue a final rule 15 requiring the submission of safety assessment certifi- 16 cations regarding how safety is being addressed by 17 each entity developing a highly automated vehicle or 18 an automated driving system. Such rule shall in- 19 clude— 20 ‘‘(A) a specification of which entities are 21 required to submit such certifications; 22 ‘‘(B) a clear description of the relevant test 23 results, data, and other contents required to be 24 submitted by such entity, in order to dem- 25 onstrate that such entity’s vehicles are likely to
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF00/20170727/106347/BILLS...
Now would be the time for moonshot projects!
I bet Trump would be willing to free a massive budgets if under his term there were a realistic chance on something like the moonlanding. Or something that would ensure him a positive entry in the history books. I truly hople Thiel or Musk use this rare opportunity.
2 years later: After numerous accidental deaths, the outcry of the public, and the behest of large tech donors fighting growing competition, politicians cater to the whims of the moment and heavily increase regulation and scrutiny of self-driving cars.
To elaborate: "Current federal rules bar self-driving cars without human controls on U.S. roads. States have issued a variety of different rules in the absence of clear federal guidance, and automakers have complained that California’s rules are too restrictive."
You serious? It's Google's self-driving car company.
Say Tesla has recorded video of some dude driving down his street in LA and their system detects a car door opening in his data stream. How can Tesla find out whether or not there actually was a car door opening? Human labelers (for billions of miles of data)? Multiple instruments?
If I were designing a system, I'd want a car with extra instruments on it that would help me validate what the primary instruments detected. The idea of just recording a bunch of live traffic seems pretty lame. (You have no way to validate any of the conclusions you draw from the data and hence no way to improve your ability to draw conclusions from the data.)
Did you see the article about Waymos test environment at Castle? That, along with a boatload of simulation, is exactly the kind of testing you need to do to develop this kind of a system.
Has Tesla ever demo'ed their simulation environment or other tests?
From "real world" recorded data you have none of these things.
This is the difference between observational and experimental data and it's a huge difference.
Dedicated test vehicles are collecting many terabytes a day. Google mentioned years ago that they're gathering over a gig per second of data from their test vehicles, and it's likely more than that now. Tesla is gathering a gig or 2 of data at a time from it's hw2 equipped cars here and there. I'm optimistic that Tesla can, by the end of the year, get to about where Google was at in 2011.
That's bull. Every other company working on fully autonomous driving is using Lidar for obstacle detection, but Tesla's cars have none (only radar and cameras). I see no reason to think their software is any better than anyone else's (in fact I would say Waymo almost certainly ahead of them there).
Why should I have any confidence that they will be able to get better results than anybody else using cheaper hardware?
Waymo has 3 million miles of self driving data. Tesla has 3 BILLION. Perhaps that can be a reason?
Benedict Evans, at A16Z, says that some of the smartest people in the automated driving field say that L5 autonomy is 15-20 years out at the earliest.
Let's just say that Elon Musk has been known to be a little "enthusiastic" when setting goals and objectives for his team.
Huge portions of traffic automated, because they really love new tech? Nah. They could have forwarded hyperloops and public traffic ages ago.
Do they get a bonus point for the next vote? Certainly not, a large part of the population earns its "good" livelihood with what this law is about to destroy.
So one wonders- can you push and incentivize the trading of still green bananas to the market- and the watch the populous lynch the producers/cripple with regulation, after the expected large failure happens? You would be seen as tech loving - and you could prevent social turmoil + reap large lobbyist gift basket.
Of course that would be very cynical and presume foresight on the part of the politician. Still.
A sort of - over-evaluation to kill a company- strategy.
If you don't have HBO - http://www.newsweek.com/john-oliver-last-week-tonight-congre...
Similarly, the anti net neutrality congresspeople can be found simply by examining the amount of campaign funds raised from the fiber/cable/wireless providers.
The folks who voted against allowing importation of equivalent drugs into the USA from Canada - just have to look at pharma contributions to congresspeople.
See the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3): The United States Congress shall have power "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."