Safety Advocates and Carmakers Speak in Congress on Autonomous Driving (Jun 27, 2017)
The US House Energy and Commerce panel held hearings today on proposed legislation to regulate the licensing of autonomous vehicles for testing on roads. There is, of course, quite a bit of that testing going on already in various states throughout the US, but the Congressional effort aims to unify regulation on the topic and create a single set of policies nationally as a result. The carmakers are, in theory, in favor of that, but only if it reflects the lighter-touch approaches currently being taken by states like California, while safety advocates are pushing for tighter regulation, more testing, and generally slowing things down. There are sensible arguments being made on both sides here – no-one, least of all the carmakers, wants high-profile accidents featuring self-driving cars putting the whole field back by years. But given the potential of autonomous driving to increase safety over time, there are also strong safety-centric arguments for allowing reasonable testing to go on without burdensome oversight. Given the current state of US politics, I’m not 100% confident that we’ll get a sensible bit of legislation out of all this, but I do think that it’s inevitable and welcome that we’ll eventually have a national framework for not just testing but ultimately selling autonomous vehicles. Testing is an area that needs to be addressed today, but commercial vehicle sales are several years away and as such there’s time to get this stuff right and no need to rush into anything today. But there are some really thorny issues here that do need to be thought through in great detail, not least questions of liability and responsibility.
via Bloomberg
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