Engineers, safety advocates and even automakers have a safety message for US federal regulators eager to get self-driving cars on the road: slow down.
Fully self-driving cars may be the future of the automotive industry, but they are not yet up to the demands of real-world driving, several people told the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) during a public meeting on Friday.
A slower, more deliberative approach may be needed instead of the agency’s rapid timetable for producing guidance for deploying the vehicles, according to an auto industry trade association.
In January, the agency said that it would begin work on writing guidance for deploying the vehicles.
Officials have promised to complete that guidance by July.
There are risks to using guidance to deviate from the US government’s traditional process of issuing regulations and standards, Association of Global Automakers safety manager Paul Scullion told the meeting.
“While this process is often time consuming, these procedural safeguards are in place for valid reasons,” Scullion said.
Working outside that process might allow the government to respond more quickly to rapidly changing technology, but that approach would likely come at the expense of thoroughness, he said.
Issuing new regulations takes an average of eight years, the NHTSA has said. Regulations are also enforceable while guidance is usually more general and open to interpretation.
NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said the agency cannot wait because early self-driving technologies are already in cars on the road.
Tesla Motors Inc’s “autopilot” function, for example, enables its cars to automatically steer down the highway, change lanes and adjust speed in response to traffic.
“Everybody asks, ‘When are they going to be ready?’ I keep saying they’re not coming; they are here now,” Rosekind said.
Without federal instructions, “people are just going to keep putting stuff out on the road with no guidance on how do we do this the right way,” he said.
Rosekind said that he sees self-driving cars as game-changing technology that could someday save the lives of many of the more than 30,000 people killed each year on the nation’s roads.
However, many of those who addressed the meeting described a host of situations that self-driving cars still cannot handle such as poorly marked pavement, including parking lots and driveways, that could foil the technology, which relies on clear lane markings.
Bad weather can interfere with vehicle sensors, while self-driving cars cannot take directions from a policeman and inconsistent traffic-control devices such as horizontal versus lateral traffic lights can also pose problems.
Until the technology has advanced beyond the point where ordinary conditions are problematic, “it is dangerous, impractical and a major threat to the public health, safety and welfare to deploy them,” National Society of Professional Engineers executive director Mark Golden said.
There have been thousands of “disengagements” reported in road tests of self-driving cars in which the vehicles automatically turned control over to a human being, said John Simpson, privacy project director of the California-based Consumer Watchdog.
“Self-driving cars simply aren’t ready to safely manage too many routine traffic situations without human intervention,” he said.
Rosekind said automakers are learning from the unanticipated situations the vehicles encounter and adapting their software.
At the same time, he said that self-driving cars, like other systems that rely on wireless technology, can be vulnerable to hacking.
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