Legislation for self-driving cars is making its way back into the conversation in Washington, D.C.
The House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation are working together to produce a bipartisan bill regulating self-driving cars. Their past two attempts to do so, the SELF-DRIVE Act in the House and the AV START Act in the Senate, failed.
“Congress got close on this last year,” said Roger Wicker, the Senate Commerce Committee chairman, in a speech at the chamber in May. “We will see how far we get this time, there are wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but I think we can get there.”
The committee panels wrote a letter to stakeholders Tuesday, hoping for feedback by Aug. 23 to pass a concrete bill. Consumer advocates and some Senate Democrats prevented the legislation from being passed in the last Congress, highlighting concerns of safety and security of the passengers.
“I have concerns about it because of the nature of California freeways, and putting unmanned automobiles on those freeways concern me greatly,” said Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, one of a handful of Democrats who blocked the bill. “Nobody has the numbers that we have, and probably the accident rate too.”
Other Democrats, including Sens. Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal, were apprehensive, calling the bill “reckless” and a “nonstarter.”
However, a spokesperson of General Motors, a company currently testing self-driving cars, said GM is “encouraged” to see the effort from lawmakers to pass legislation.
“We look forward to continuing discussions on autonomous vehicles at the federal, state and local levels aimed at creating an environment to foster safe development, testing and deployment of self-driving vehicles,” the spokesperson said.
Supporters of the autonomous automobiles not only point out reduction in accidents and safety of passengers, but also discuss the communication possibilities of the cars if connected to traffic lights, or even, cars communicating with each other. This is said to ease traffic congestion and cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions.
“When we get to 5G, you’ll be able to know when a vehicle far ahead of you intends to change lanes or starts to brake even if it’s beyond your line of sight,” said Nakul Duggal, the vice president of product management for Qualcomm.
Qualcomm is one of the many tech companies who began developing cellular communication to vehicles last year.
“There could even be special lanes where autonomous vehicles are allowed to travel really fast because they’re able to share information about incoming and outgoing traffic at great speed,” Duggal added.
