New US guidelines on self-driving cars coming in July, NHTSA official says
The U.S. Department of Transportation will reportedly be laying out new guidelines on self-driving cars in July, hoping to improve the speed with which companies like Apple and Google can deploy their technology.
Tesla's upcoming Model 3, which already has some limited autonomous tech.
Regulations need to evolve faster, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration head Mark Rosekind told an industry conference in Detroit, according to Fortune.
Notably the administrator proposed that self-driving systems shouldn't have to be perfect to be authorized, only a minimum of twice as good as human-operated vehicles. This would theoretically cutdown on American highway deaths, which Rosekind likened to "a 747 crashing every week for a year."
He also hinted at the possibility of accepting a Tesla offer to share data from cars equipped with its Autopilot feature, which while not fully self-driving can keep a vehicle on a highway and avoid collisions with other drivers.
"We're looking to see what the offer might be," Rosekind explained. "If the offer is there, we're going for it."
The NHTSA has previously said that while there are many legal obstacles before cars without wheels or pedals can be sold, there are far fewer barriers towards cars that keep those human controls as a backup.
Apple is believed to be developing an electric car under the codename "Project Titan." The first model could ship as soon as 2019 or 2020, but may not initially be autonomous. That could have to wait for subsequent models or software updates.
Tesla's upcoming Model 3, which already has some limited autonomous tech.
Regulations need to evolve faster, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration head Mark Rosekind told an industry conference in Detroit, according to Fortune.
Notably the administrator proposed that self-driving systems shouldn't have to be perfect to be authorized, only a minimum of twice as good as human-operated vehicles. This would theoretically cutdown on American highway deaths, which Rosekind likened to "a 747 crashing every week for a year."
He also hinted at the possibility of accepting a Tesla offer to share data from cars equipped with its Autopilot feature, which while not fully self-driving can keep a vehicle on a highway and avoid collisions with other drivers.
"We're looking to see what the offer might be," Rosekind explained. "If the offer is there, we're going for it."
The NHTSA has previously said that while there are many legal obstacles before cars without wheels or pedals can be sold, there are far fewer barriers towards cars that keep those human controls as a backup.
Apple is believed to be developing an electric car under the codename "Project Titan." The first model could ship as soon as 2019 or 2020, but may not initially be autonomous. That could have to wait for subsequent models or software updates.
Comments
Fully autonomous cars that drive as good as an experienced driver on all kinds of roads under all weather conditions are currently impossible and will stay impossible for many years.
The only way to approve the driving of an autonomous car is to test it in the same way as human drivers; it has to pass the drivers exam. You can call it the drivers Turing test, if the car performs better or equal to the exam norm it will pass, if it violates the law later on it has to pass the exam again like human drivers have to (in some situations), also, each car has to pass individually.
BTW, the last two sentences of yours ended up in my head in a kind of uncontrollable "Jony Ive voiceover"...
If he means twice as good as the idiot drivers I come across every day during the commute, then it's totally doable. Those people should have their license taken away, so it's like being twice as good as "zero". Anything is an improvement.
I bought a new car a few months ago and it has so many bells-and-whistles, especially in the area of auto-safety and the thing can practically drive, park, and prevent a collision all on its own. Amazing tech. Sure there are some rough edges with the tech, but in 5-10 years... we may be approaching the ending of cars that need to be driven manually.
After seeing a youtube video of Model S on a 44 min varied commute and just my 'interpretation' required in some daily scenarios to safely navigate to my home, Im convinced mixed car(auto and non- auto) wide spread level 4 autonomous (ie door to door) is a long ways off, if ever.
Perhaps its possible if manual driving is 'banned'!!
However, I can imagine very soon have autonomous for 'approved highway' sections in VDR (Visual Driving Rules-- ie good weather) conditions.
Leads to another aspect--- governments are going to need to step up road maintenance (clear painted lines etc)
IMO -A Driver test presumes the test-ee has all the advanced human motor(pun) / coordination skills and has the ability to 'quickly learn' to more advance levels (as stated in many post here... evidence to the contrary!)
nose cone.
Autonomous driving of an acceptable level is not to be expected for many years in the future.
Car companies would like you to believe that, so they can sell another expensive product - that's probably the reason Mark talks like that - but apart from lack of vision (which is also a real problem, I admit that) car companies cannot be trusted.
The right approach is to assist humans while they fail, not trying to replace the things they are good at (that is almost impossible). So when a driver falls asleep a car brakes safely and doesn't hit a tree totally unnecessarily, that's real value, that will save lives.
Idiot drivers should be punished by having to use a car that looks at all speed limits and prevent speeding in this way. Every car should have black box functionality so drivers know they could be checked, and so on. This will drive down fatalities and injuries in a gigantic way.