How the government plans to make your self-driving car safer
A self-driving car may someday have to decide between your life and the lives of others. But how should the car choose? If you donât know how to make that decision, thatâs okay â Washington doesnât either.
Thatâs one big takeaway in a new, lengthy document from the Department of Transportation that lays out options to make autonomous vehicles saferâand represents the most public sign of the attention self-driving cars are getting from politicians despite their inability to vote.
Over just the past three months, a Tesla driver died when his carâs autopilot software failed to detect a turning tractor-trailer, Ford (F) began showing off its own autonomous (and exceedingly polite) vehicles, Lyft founder John Zimmer predicted that the majority of that ride-hailing serviceâs trips would involve self-driving cars by 2021, and Uber launched a trial of self-driving cars in Pittsburghâin which human drivers remain seated upfront, just in case.
Itâs enough to make Google, once the most public advocate of driverless cars, look like itâs falling behind.
The rapid progress has also left government policy makers and auto-industry lawyers with their own catching up to do.
On Tuesday, the Obama administration set out its plan to bring national oversight to self-driving cars that, as President Obama argued in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed, bring such benefits as âsafer, more accessible drivingâ and âless congested, less polluted roads.â
Remember, we human drivers arenât as good as we think. US motor-vehicle crashes killed 35,902 people in 2015, and driver choice or error caused 94% of those accidents.
The Department of Transportationâs proposed framework, as outlined in a 116-page National Highway Traffic Safety Administration document, stresses guidance over regulation.
NHTSAâs recommended âSafety Assessmentâ covers 15 criteria, from âData Recording and Sharingâ to âObject and Event Detection and Response.â The agency doesnât stipulate metrics and in some cases tosses the hard choices for âHighly Automated Vehiclesâ to the industry.
For example, under âEthical Considerations,â the paper shies away from a bright-line rule like, say, âA self-driving car may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.â Instead, it admits that when a self-driving car can only protect one person at the cost of another, its programming âwill have a significant influence over the outcome for each individual.â Yes, it will.
NHTSA counsels against expecting people to take over after a software malfunction: âhuman drivers may be inattentive, under the influence of alcohol or other substances, drowsy or physically impaired in some other manner.â
Thatâs something Google learned early on, when it found that Google employees whoâd volunteered to test self-driving cars started ignoring the road â even though cameras in test cars recorded their behavior.
Today, car manufacturers certify their own vehicles, after which NHTSA conducts spot checks and, if necessary, orders recalls. The paper devotes much of its length to exploring other alternatives, from the kind of pre-market testing the Federal Aviation Authority does to certify each new aircraft type to intermediate levels of regulation that might involve third-party testing.
My own prediction: NHTSA will gravitate towards enforcement mechanisms that donât require new legislation, since weâve all seen how inefficient Congress can be at moving forward with tech policy.
A panel discussion at a conference in New York revealed other potential complications, most involving the information that a self-driving or only partially-autonomous car must handle to do its job.
âAutonomous vehicles create and generate an enormous amount of data,â said Allison Hoff Cohen, managing counsel at Toyota (TM). For self-driving cars to take off, she said, that data must stay private by default â with clear customer incentives for any disclosure you might make.
Who would want that data? Car-insurance firms, for one. For years, some have offered discounts to motorists willing to have their driving habits tracked; panel moderator Jonathan Beckham, a lawyer with Greenberg Traurig, suggested insurers would line up to offer additional benefits if they could get more insight about drivers of partially autonomous vehicles.
State and local governments looking to ease traffic will also want to tap into the artificial brainpower of self-driving cars, observed Darius Withers, in-house counsel at Accenture LLP (and a regular on Washingtonâs Beltway). âThe data is particularly valuable to them,â he said.
Until cars reach total autonomy â at which point the steering wheel goes away â weâll also have to decide how much liability falls upon drivers who disable all or part of a carâs automated systems.
Toyotaâs Cohen noted that a car that can read the roads could also read its occupants. She sketched out a future in which an autonomous car would drop a parent off at her job, then return home and take the kids to school, recognizing each family member automatically.
That could streamline many family errands, but it would also intersect with different privacy rules â which, as she said in a conversation after the panel, get particularly strict in Europe.
Starting off in first gear
The politics of all this are almost guaranteed to get weird. People have understandable hangups about yielding control to robots, even when theyâre demonstrably worse than their machines, and the high prices of many vehicles sold today with assisted-driving features threaten to add a little class resentment to the mix.
And itâll only take one story about somebody behaving grossly irresponsibly in a self-driving car to set back the entire discussion.
But we have to figure this out. Tens of thousands of lives are at stake, year after year. I donât know how long it will take to put self-driving cars into wide and accepted use, but I hope itâs less than 10 years from now â when my daughter will be old enough to get her driverâs license.
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