Self-driving cars are here! Self-driving Ubers started picking up passengers in Pittsburgh last week while companies like Google, Ford, Apple and more are road-testing autonomous vehicles across the country.
Now the US Department of Transportation this week issued a new policy for automated vehicles.
The Federal Automated Vehicle Policy, which the government considers a “proactive approach,” is split into four parts: vehicle performance guidance (a 15-point safety assessment); model state policy (delineates federal and state roles); current regulatory tools; and modern regulatory rules.
The vehicle guidance basically sets up rules for how the feds will determine if a self-driving car is safe, from pre-deployment design, development, and testing to commercial sale or operation on public roads.
A model state policy will allow states to issue licenses and registration and make sure that cars can drive across state lines without issue and auto makers won’t need to meet individual state requirements, which would slow down the industry.
DOT will also step in with self-driving cars if there is a safety issue, as it does with traditional vehicles. “NHTSA has the authority to identify safety defects, allowing the Agency to recall vehicles or equipment that pose an unreasonable risk to safety even when there is no applicable Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS).”
The FMVSS—which dates back to 1966—assumes cars will be driven by human occupants. But advancements in technology means that won’t always be the case. As such, existing safety standards make it nearly impossible for manufacturers to certify cars with automated features, necessitating the DOT’s new guidelines.
This new policy, meanwhile, focuses primarily on highly automated vehicles—those that do not require a human behind the wheel—but also touches on lower levels, including the driver-assistance systems currently being deployed. “We are moving forward on the safe deployment of automated technologies because of the enormous promise they hold to address the overwhelming majority of crashes and save lives,” NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind said.
The Federal Automated Vehicle Policy is now open for public comment for 60 days. If approved, it will be updated annually.
David Strickland, spokesman and general counsel for the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, this week gave USDOT and NHTSA the seal of approval, calling the new policy “an important step forward in establishing the basis of a national framework for the deployment of self-driving vehicles.
