California puzzles over safety of driverless cars
California puzzles over safety of driverless cars
Dec 21, 10:46 AM (ET)
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD
LOS ANGELES (AP) — California's Department of Motor
Vehicles will miss a year-end deadline to adopt new rules for cars of the
future because regulators first have to figure out how they'll know whether
"driverless" vehicles are safe.
It's a rare case of the law getting ahead of an emerging
technology and reflects regulators' struggle to balance consumer protection
with innovation.
Safety is a chief selling point, since self-driving cars
— thanks to an array of sensors — promise to have much greater road awareness
and quicker reaction time than people. Plus, they won't text, drink or doze
off.
Though the cars are at least a few years away from
showrooms, seven companies are testing prototypes on California's roads, and
regulators have questions: Do they obey all traffic laws? What if their
computers freeze? Can they smoothly hand control back to human drivers?
DMV officials say they won't let the public get
self-driving cars until someone can certify that they don't pose an undue risk.
The problem is that the technology remains so new there are no accepted
standards to verify its safety. Absent standards, certifying safety would be
like grading a test without an answer key.
Broadly, the department has three options: It could
follow the current U.S. system, in which manufacturers self-certify their
vehicles; it could opt for a European system, in which independent companies
verify safety; or the state could (implausibly) get into the testing business.
"It's a huge undertaking," said Bernard
Soriano, who oversees the DMV's regulatory process. "There are all of
these issues that need to be adequately answered."
Manufacturers generally would prefer self-certification.
That may be where California ends up, but for now the DMV is exploring
independent certification — something that doesn't exist for driverless cars.
In July, the DMV asked third-party testers whether they'd
be interested in getting into the game. The department doesn't have the
expertise to create a safety standard and testing framework, so "the
department wanted to get a very good sense of what is out there in the
market," according to Russia Chavis, a deputy secretary at the California
State Transportation Agency, which oversees the DMV and requested a deeper
exploration of third-party alternatives to self-certification.
Two large European testers and two businesses in Ohio
responded to the DMV's request. None was ready to implement a program
immediately.
So the department is asking industry, consumer groups and
other interested parties to gather in January for a public workshop on safety
standards.
Whatever course California officials take could influence
how other states — and perhaps even the federal government — approach the
issue. California is such a large consumer market that in many cases its rules
become de facto national standards.
Federal transportation officials have said they don't
plan to write driverless car safety standards any time soon, and they don't
want states writing their own. SAE International, an association of engineers,
has been developing a set of safety guidelines — but those are for vehicle
testing and don't get into specific performance levels that would be needed for
commercially available cars.
California's Jan. 1 deadline was set by a 2012 state law
that regulated testing on public roads and required the DMV to publish rules
guiding what carmakers need to do before they can bring the vehicles to market.
The law also says the DMV should encourage the development of driverless cars.
Regulations often lag cutting-edge technology, but
California's driverless car policy has developed sooner because of lobbying
from one of the state's signature companies: Google.
Self-driving vehicles are a departure from the Silicon
Valley giant's Internet search and advertising core, but a priority for
co-founder Sergey Brin.
Even before Google pushed the 2012 law that officially
legalized driverless technology, the Silicon Valley giant had dispatched its
cars hundreds of thousands of miles. Google says its Toyota Priuses and Lexus
SUVs, souped up with radar, cameras and laser sensors, have an excellent safety
record. They have been involved in just a "few" accidents, though not
at fault in any of them, spokeswoman Courtney Hohne said.
Google has its own idea for how to determine whether
vehicles are safe.
At a March hearing on DMV regulations, Ron Medford, the
company's driverless car safety director and a former federal transportation
official, suggested the department do road testing.
"I would be cautious," he said, "not to
make some of these things more complicated than they are."
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Contact Justin Pritchard at http://twitter.com/lalanewsman.
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