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US Regulators Issue Comprehensive Policy On Self-Driving Cars (vox.com) 239

Posted by BeauHD from the emerging-technology dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Vox: On Monday, [The U.S. Department of Transportation] released a surprisingly far-reaching "Federal Automated Vehicles Policy." The policy attempts to do all sorts of things -- we'll get into the details below -- but the overarching motivation is that DOT wants to accelerate the development and adoption of AVs. DOT views AVs as a safety technology that could reduce some of the 38,000 traffic fatalities a year in the U.S., 95 percent of which are caused by human error. It also sees AVs as an accessibility technology that could provide personal transportation to whole populations (disabled, elderly, etc.) who have lacked it. The policy comes in four buckets: What the vehicles need to do to be safe; What federal and state governments need to do; How DOT will use its existing regulatory tools; DOT may need brand new regulatory tools to deal with AVs. The "vehicle performance" section lays out a 15-point safety assessment, so that AV developers and manufacturers know the sorts of things that federal regulators will expect. It covers everything from cybersecurity to data collection to crash response. And then there are "ethical considerations." AVs will have to make life-or-death decisions. The second section addresses the division of responsibilities and authorities between the federal government and state governments, and suggests a model policy that states can adapt for their own use. The feds will retain their authority to set and enforce safety standards, communicate with the public about safety, and occasionally issue guidances about how to meet national standards. States will retain their authority to license human drivers and register cars, set and enforce traffic laws, and regulate vehicle insurance and liability. There are three broad ways that DOT communicates about standards with automakers: letters of interpretation, exemptions and rule-makings. It is promising to speed up all of them in regard to HAVs. DOT is considering a range of new authorities that may be necessary to properly regulate HAVs. The report adds that "DOT has officially abandoned the NHTSA's own levels-of-automation classification in favor of SAE's, which is preferred by the industry. Vox has neat graphic you can view here. President Obama also wrote a piece about self-driving cars in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "In the seven-and-a-half years of my presidency, self-driving cars have gone from sci-fi fantasy to an emerging reality with the potential to transform the way we live..."
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US Regulators Issue Comprehensive Policy On Self-Driving Cars More

US Regulators Issue Comprehensive Policy On Self-Driving Cars

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  • It can't come soon enough... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jeffb (2.718) ( 1189693 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @08:06AM (#52923027)

    ...to save me and my family from all the "excellent drivers" who are busy on their phones while speeding down the freeway. Some of them, no doubt, posting diatribes about Big Government taking away their right to maintain complete and perfect control over their vehicle's performance.

  • Excellent! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by H3lldr0p ( 40304 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @08:20AM (#52923089) Homepage

    This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road. And better, one of the government agencies in charge of seeing this happen has outlined a plan to get it to happen. Not just in terms of what the manufactures need to get done on their end to be legal but also an outline of the regulatory apparatus required to ensure the safety of everyone!

    I call this a win on just about every level.

    • This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.

      Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bigpat ( 158134 )

        This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.

        Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.

        Okay now they are here.

        • Re:Excellent! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by goose-incarnated ( 1145029 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @10:10AM (#52923807) Journal

          This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.

          Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.

          Okay now they are here.

          Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars. Even Tesla (and many of slashdot regulars) point out that "autopilot" doesn't mean that the car can drive itself.

          We've had the hardware to do self-driving cars for about 20 years now, and for the same amount of time very little progress was made on the software. We still don't have software that can drive a car in anything but perfect conditions, and even in perfect conditions they aren't able to do better than humans in perfect conditions.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by bigpat ( 158134 )

            This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.

            Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.

            Okay now they are here.

            Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars.

            You mean available to purchase by consumers? Okay, not yet. But Uber is rolling out commercial service using self driving cars right now and multiple companies apparently have fully autonomous vehicles on the public roads now. And acedemic/research teams have had fully self driving cars for at least ten years.

            At least the Uber example has to be considered as commercial availability since this is one of the ways companies will offer self driving cars to the public, on a per trip basis. They are here.

            • This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road.

              Before getting this technology legal and on the road, perhaps we should focus on getting this technology? For the last five years I've been hearing that "Self-driving cars are here already", but sadly they aren't.

              Okay now they are here.

              Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars.

              You mean available to purchase by consumers?

              No, I meant "available at all".

              Okay, not yet. But Uber is rolling out commercial service using self driving cars right now

              No, they aren't - there's a human in the drivers seat.

              and multiple companies apparently have fully autonomous vehicles on the public roads now.

              Wrong again - no company has demonstrated a self-driving car in anything other than perfect conditions.

              And acedemic/research teams have had fully self driving cars for at least ten years.

              Yeah, right - and these decade-old technology is soooo undesirable that neither Uber, nor Tesla, nor Lyft offered them money for it, right? It's just sitting there, in the university

              At least the Uber example has to be considered as commercial availability since this is one of the ways companies will offer self driving cars to the public, on a per trip basis. They are here.

              No, they are not. Word of their imminent arrival is here. Look around - all self-driving cars need a driver in the seat. Academia has been wor

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by bigpat ( 158134 )

                A few of your points are somewhat absurd. Having an observer in the car is irrelevant to whether the car is actually driving autonomously or not... if the car is driving from point A to point B without a human actually driving then it is autonomous. Having someone ready to take over if the car fails is a precaution. From everything I have read the Uber cars are autonomous. So are the Google cars and there are some articles about other companies testing cars on city streets around the world.

                And this whol

              • Correction.. Uber has TWO drivers, but soon they hope to cut back to one.

          • Where? I see driver-assist cars, but no self-driving cars.

            No, you do see them -- they just aren't competent in as wide a range of situations as (some) human drivers are. They can take control of the vehicle and drive without any input from the driver in quite a range of circumstances. This is nto to say they are perfect, but neither are humans. In re humans, there are driving circumstances, various, that some humans are competent in, and some aren't; it's not like people are uniformly homogeneous in driving

            • This is nto to say they are perfect, but neither are humans

              So how is putting MORE imperfection on the road a solution to anything? Especially imperfection that is not likely to coexist with human thinking very well and thus cause even more mistakes to happen?

  • Insanity (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's insane even considering implementing beta technology when people's actual lives are at stake. I weep for my country and its rampant greed.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by b0bby ( 201198 )

      Are you talking about the 38,000 lives which are lost every year in car crashes? I think we'd have been way ahead of the game if we had taken half of the money we have poured into the TSA since 9/11 and used it to push this technology. We would have saved way more lives than the TSA will ever hope to.

      • So you want the government to invest in a technology that will *both* save huge numbers of lives *and* massively increase convenience? That seems antithetical to what government does.

      • I'm getting tired of these kinds of arguments.. Please explain how those 38,000 people would afford an automated car even if they were real.

  • but what is evident from the ThinkStock-like illustration that goes with Barack Obama's article: this is going to greatly favour Uber, a company to be abhorred for its greed, stupidity and lack of ethics.

  • Will automated cars lift or stiffle the poor (Score:3)

    by mitgib ( 1156957 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @08:42AM (#52923173) Homepage Journal
    How many jobs will automated cars eliminate? Cabs and couriers are my first thought, large trucks provide millions of entry level jobs. I know automation will come one day, but are we just making more poor people.

    • Re:Will automated cars lift or stiffle the poor (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @09:10AM (#52923349)

      I know automation will come one day, but are we just making more poor people.

      You're right! We should ban job-destroying things like this. And the cotton gin. Combine harvester. Railroads (do you even grasp how many teamster jobs were lost to the railroads??). Steamships. Fore-and-Aft-rigged sailing ships.

      All of those things cost jobs! Thousands to millions of them each! So we should roll things back to 1600's technology, and we wouldn't have so many poor, unemployed people!

      • All those previous things you mentioned were technologies that greatly increased productivity - that is, they produced greatly more output with less input, so they had a significant effect of reducing cost of pretty much everything. This meant the temporary effects of job transitions were not as harsh, because there was an environment of increased standard of living.

        We aren't in a world like that any more - technology is not passing the results of increased productivity on to higher standards of living at t

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tnk1 ( 899206 )

          The commercial implications of automation will also increase productivity in terms of the ability to operate trucks more consistently and more safely than human drivers.

          And for personal transport, fully automated vehicles allows for significant safety and eventually efficiency and traffic flow improvements.

          Is it as revolutionary as the automobile itself? Perhaps not. But depending on how it is implemented and applied, it could certainly have value.

          Nevertheless, I agree about the job situation. We're remo

        • What you're describing is why significant economic and social change are waiting in the wings as we discuss this. These changes are coming; and they will be qualitatively and quantitatively different than any changes prior, such as trains, fore and aft rigged ships, and the cotton gin.

          Grab the popcorn.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      Fully automated cars will potentially reduce or remove the need for individual vehicle ownership. Many more people could share a car, or send it out to 'uber' for them and make them money. These vehicles could then be used by those who cannot afford a car or are otherwise disadvantage to transit to employment, appointments, etc.
      • If it is a choice between sharing an automated car or having a manual one in my driveway, I'll keep my manual car thanks. My wife and I have the stuff we want in our car, my kids have the stuff they want, it's our space. Not interested in taking someone else's car wherever I go.
    • Should be easier to live in their cars by programming them not to stay parked in one place at night.

    • It's a matter of rate.

      Eliminating jobs slowly makes us richer because prices can't perfectly match inflation. Costs change unevenly between products, and inflation is hard to know; there's universal competition (Ugg boots versus iPhones: can you afford both? Which will make you fit in with the cool kids best?); and, to be historically reductionist, that's the way it's always worked largely because it's mathematically impossible for it to work any other way (how do you think we manage to buy more than

      • So people who can't afford food and shelter for their families are richer? Who knew??

        • To a degree, yes. At this point, food is easier to afford in, say, 1950, 1860, or 1790. People who can't afford food and shelter for their families can sort of get by on whatever they can scrape together from digging out scrap or begging; and society, at large, has a wide margin allowing it to provide food and shelter without collapsing the economy (an impossible task before the Industrial Revolution).

          Circa 2013, the amount of money in play for public policy to flatly end homelessness and hunger in the

          • You should visit Africa, or a place where people actually die of starvation on the streets. Sounds like you might like it.

            • Africa's technology is shitty in some regions. There are places where their farm practice is actually slash-and-burn without a checker pattern, meaning it's a rolling front of destruction without even the benefit of surrounding jungle to fill back in over the next few years. They don't even have the most advanced hand tools, much less industrial farm machinery, fertilizer, and pesticides. They destroy large swaths of land to feed small numbers of people, and most still can't afford to eat; and there are

              • What can Africa produce to trade for fuel to run all this technology?

                Most of Africa is not exactly short on insolation, so if there's anyone who should be using solar-electric, it's them. What can they produce to trade for PV systems?

                • They've also got a geothermal region in the east, which would let them produce a lot of geothermal energy. What about the states in West Africa?

                  It's said that a land area the size of the state of Maine in North Africa could produce enough PV output to power the European Union. Likewise, that area could pipe energy to the rest of Africa, making for a robust power source to drive electric farm equipment instead of diesel. Again: what do the poor west-Africans trade to North Africa to buy their power?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fyngyrz ( 762201 )

        Because prices don't keep with inflation, we end up with more buying power. The median family has gone from spending 43% of its income on food (1900) to 30% (1950) to 11% (today), and now buys highly-engineered cars (anti-lock brakes, satellite radio, crumple zones, complex suspensions), cell phones, and high-speed internet as well as food.

        Yes, but the largest economic factors for the little guys are worse:

        o Housing costs - far beyond anything even remotely rational
        o Schooling costs - rising way faster than

        • Housing costs - far beyond anything even remotely rational

          Housing is kind of annoying. We actually buy bigger houses now than in prior years, and spend more. In 2010, the average new single-family home was 2,300sqft, and the average housing expense was 33%; whereas in 1950, the average home was 983sqft, and housing expense was 28%. About half of that is actually rent or mortgage in both cases. That means housing in 2010 cost about half as much per square foot as housing in 1950, and we bought 2.3 times as much of it.

          Housing is not flexible: if 700sqft apar

  • Need Smart Roads, Too (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DevsVult ( 207779 ) <.ac.suoicilatcarf. .ta. .mada.> on Tuesday September 20, 2016 @08:49AM (#52923219) Homepage
    One area not mentioned, at least in Vox's summary of the new regulations, is smart road technologies. Here, sensors in and around roads would share information with automated vehicles, and possibly mediate information exchanges between vehicles. Once many of the vehicles on a road are talking to the road and each other, it becomes straightforward to: i) Route traffic around obstructions, efficiently merging cars into open lanes well before the point of obstruction. ii) Clear a path for emergency vehicles. iii) Spread traffic efficiently over available routes to clear or avoid congestion. iv) Organize "convoys" of vehicles going in similar directions to take advantage of drafting and traffic light priority. iv) Operate a marketplace in which vehicles can bid for access to express lanes or right-of-way. (Late for a crucial meeting? Pay other cars $5 each to pull out of the way.)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      iv) Operate a marketplace in which vehicles can bid for access to express lanes or right-of-way. (Late for a crucial meeting? Pay other cars $5 each to pull out of the way.)

      Toll roads around DC now implement a congestion based fee, so that accounts for your marketplace. And I don't have a problem with that.

      But paying other cars to get out of the way? That smells of a have vs have-nots class based society and potentially turns public roads into the private roads of the super rich.

    • We absolutely do not need smart roads. No. Smart roads with sensors all over the place are the opposite of what we need and will delay the adoption of autonomous vehicles if they become the focus of adoption or some sort of prerequisite. Not now and maybe not ever.

      We need autonomous cars that are good at driving on dumb roads because dumb and sometimes poorly maintained roads are what the majority of roads will always be. Only after we have a good portion of the cars autonomous should we even begin to

    • V2V ("vehicle to vehicle") communication is coming, and it will be able to do all of that without "smart roads". Nonetheless, the very same technologies used in V2V and VA will be directly applicable to smart roads, and perhaps there will be some roadside sensors which will make contributions to the V2V network.

  • Industry: We want one set of nationwide (or, better yet, global) rules covering features and liability.

    Feds: What rules would you like?

    Industry: It hardly matters, since we make money in any predictable environment. But since you ask, we do have some suggestions . . .

  • the elephant in the room (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Self driving cars will spell an end to any shred of privacy.

    Today if you do not carry a cellular phone most cars do not "phone home" with data about your travels. Self driving cars will exist to collect as much data about you as possible and report back to Google or whomever.

    • About that statement...
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      The technology is not exclusive to law enforcement and is increasingly popular right now for the management of large parking lots that are "for customers only".
      I can imagine plenty of other uses. So whatever privacy you think you still have in your stick-shift legacy automobile is just an illusion.

  • I wish I could mod the previous AC up, but I'll have to use my karma instead. Here's a link to the actual subject of the story:

    https://www.transportation.gov/AV [transportation.gov]

    Amazing that neither the /. editor nor the linked/plagiarized Vox article bothered to provide it.

  • This is one of the rare technology advances where the government's interests align with getting the technology to be pervasive (typically, you'd have to fight and/or circumvent the government to push disruptive technology... see SpaceX, for example). That will virtually guarantee government approval for mainstream use, and probably slightly before the technology is actually safe.

    It's hard to imagine a better technology for the government, though. Track everyone driving, set speeds to whatever you want, stop

  • We have traffic lights that tell pedestrians to cross at the same time that they tell people to turn left into them.
    We have increasing raddi turns.

    The city planners who don't plan, and the city engineers who don't know anything about engineering usually ever get called out.

    It's always cheaper to blame the pilot than the plane. It's cheaper to blame the driver than the make out cities coherent to drive in.

    • We have traffic lights that tell pedestrians to cross at the same time that they tell people to turn left into them.

      I've never seen that. Where have you?

      We have increasing raddi turns.

      The problem is not increasing- but decreasing-radius turns, commonly known as "fish hooks". Even with signage, they catch out many drivers, who are poor at braking into turns.

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