Little is known about President-elect Trump’s position on self-driving cars. The Republican has said (or tweeted) nothing about the burgeoning technology. Ditto for his pick to run the Transportation Department, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao.
However, when the nomination was announced in November, several industry leaders applauded the move.
“We congratulate Elaine Chao on her nomination as secretary of transportation, and we welcome the opportunity to work with her on bringing the safety and mobility benefits of fully self-driving vehicles to America’s roads and highways,” said the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a group comprising Ford, Lyft, Uber, Volvo Cars and Waymo. The message was attributed to the group’s general counsel, David Strickland, a former administrator of President Obama’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The outgoing transportation secretary, Anthony Foxx, recently advised his successor to continue the administration’s progress of promoting what it views as the future of safe driving.
“In the 1960s we had to fight industry to require seatbelts in vehicles, and to take other safety measures,” Foxx wrote in an 11-page memo released this month. “The result of these safety battles paid off: the motor vehicle fatality rate has dropped by 80 percent.”
“Now, fifty years later we are working with the automobile and technology industries to shape policies to ensure safe deployment of autonomous and connected vehicles on our roads, which have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives annually,” Foxx added. “It is estimated that connected vehicles and new crash avoidance technology could potentially address 94 percent of crashes involving unimpaired drivers.”
With safety in mind, the Obama administration proposed a 10-year, $4 billion investment in researching safe automated vehicle technology as part of its fiscal 2017 budget. Last September, the Transportation Department’s NHTSA released guidelines to “further guide the safe testing and deployment” of automated vehicles, which includes a 15-point checklist.
Obama says self-driving cars could one day save tens of thousands of lives. Every year, 37,000 people die in car accidents on U.S. roadways alone, says the Association for Safe International Road Travel; 94 percent of those car crashes are due to human error, according to federal statistics.
Obama’s administration has been a big proponent of the technology, which it sees as a way to prevent accidents, but that safety needs to be a sure thing.
“[M]ake no mistake: If a self-driving car isn’t safe, we have the authority to pull it off the road,” Obama wrote in a September 2016 op-ed for the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.
The agency also adopted SAE International’s six levels of automation. On a zero-to-six scale, the model defines the various steps from “No Automation” (Level 0), to “Driver Assistance” and “Partial Automation” (Levels 1-2), “Conditional Automation” and “High Automation” (Levels 3-4), to “Full Automation” (Level 5).
At levels 4 and 5, the act of driving is completely controlled by the artificial intelligence, though at level 4 the car might request that the driver intervene to perform certain maneuvers.
The highest levels are still years away, but many car companies are looking to bring fleets of lower-level automated cars to the streets in just a few years. Brands such as Ford, BMW and Audi are looking to bring their AI-powered models to market by the early 2020s.
More than 130 exhibitors at this month’s International CES exhibition showcased self-driving technology, which may one day be found in cars that drive, park and avoid collisions all by themselves. Attendees had a chance to take demo rides in concept vehicles with no hands on the wheel. While the rides thrilled passengers on test courses, there are still some speed bumps to address in the technology devised by an array of software, cameras and sensors.
Last summer marked the first fatality in a self-driving car crash. A man from Ohio was killed while driving a Tesla Model S in autopilot mode after colliding with a tractor-trailer. Tesla’s “Autopilot” technology is a Level 2, according to the NHTSA guidelines, which still requires the human driver to be in command at the wheel. A preliminary NHTSA report determined the car failed to apply the breaks in time when the 18-wheeler made a turn in front of it.
The setback didn’t stop Tesla CEO Elon Musk from announcing in October plans for building a line of fully autonomous cars. In a call with reporters, Musk criticized the media for focusing so much attention on a handful of self-driving car accidents while largely ignoring the more than 1 million people who die every year in crashes involving manually driven cars around the world.
“If, in writing some article that’s negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you’re killing people,” he said.
Some reassurance can be gleaned from studies predicting a strong market for automation in the coming decades.
By 2035, Boston Consulting Group expects there may be 12 million fully autonomous units sold a year around the world, creating a $77 billion market.
Regulators are already laying the groundwork for coming up with rules for a fleet of autonomous cars. But beyond the Obama administration’s recommendations, meant to influence state policy, there are no federal regulations to dictate automated car safety.
“The Model State Policy issued at this point builds on the collective knowledge gathered thus far, and can help to avoid a patchwork of inconsistent laws and regulations among the 50 states and other U.S. jurisdictions, which could delay the widespread deployment of these potentially lifesaving technologies,” the NHTSA report says.
The regulations do vary widely in the handful states and Washington, D.C., which have authorized automated vehicle use. In California, for example, testing self-driving cars requires a company to prove it has $5 million in insurance and that all test drivers are trained, according to National Conference of State Legislatures. Meanwhile, regulations in Arizona are far less strict. Gov. Doug Ducey signed an executive order in 2015 telling state agencies to “undertake any necessary steps to support the testing and operation of self-driving vehicles on public roads within Arizona.”
