The Obama administration proposed spending nearly $4 billion over a decade to make driverless cars on U.S. roads more widespread in an effort to curb fatalities and traffic jams.
The proposal, which still requires congressional approval, aims to have federal regulators work with auto makers and others to craft policies and potential rules across the U.S. for policing autonomous vehicles that move without a driver at the wheel. Regulators would also test so-called connected vehicles that talk to one another to avoid crashes in designated spots across the U.S. under the $3.9 billion budget proposal.
It isn't clear whether or when any new regulations might be adopted. Regulators said they plan to issue guidance within six months on preferred performance characteristics and testing methods for driverless cars and collaborate with state officials on policies.
A lack of clear guidance from regulators is among the barriers auto makers cite to allowing driverless cars to proliferate. Car makers prefer to have a clear national road map for approving autonomous vehicles as opposed to a patchwork of rules among different states. U.S. regulators, meanwhile, are eager to encourage technologies that can improve vehicle safety and reduce the nation's more than 32,000 annual road fatalities. Driverless cars also hold out the hope of reducing pollution and providing more-efficient transportation, according to government and industry officials.
"Automated vehicles open up opportunities for saving time, saving lives and saving fuel," U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said during a news conference at the North American International Auto Show. In addition to improved safety, he pointed to driverless cars easing the effects of explosive population growth, which is expected to clog American roads. "We are bullish on automated vehicles."
U.S. regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, meanwhile, plan to exempt some autonomous vehicles from existing rules if they deem them to provide significant safety benefits. Car makers could be allowed to put 2,500 driverless cars on the road for up to two years that might otherwise violate U.S. regulations.
Officials didn't detail current rules that might prevent driverless cars from being approved. But they encouraged car makers to ask regulators for advice. They pointed to a letter recently sent to BMW AG advising that a remote-controlled parking system's design doesn't run afoul of a U.S. rule governing brakes.
"The clarity is important," said Mark Reuss, General Motors Co.'s product development chief. He and Chief Executive Mary Barra met with NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind on Wednesday.
"The time piece of it, if it throttles us a little bit because it's safer...then so be it," Mr. Reuss said, adding that national standards would need to work with local rules. "The road systems are different in every single town. Vehicles as they get this technology are going to have to operate in a lot different scenarios. We have to be precise when we do this."
The scant details behind Thursday's announcement show that regulators are racing to keep pace with advancing technologies that are already putting driverless cars on the road, albeit often for tests and other limited uses. The overarching federal automobile safety law was passed in 1966, long before the advent of driverless cars. While regulations are continually updated, they currently tend to focus on seat belts, brakes, air bags, and how well vehicles can withstand crashes as opposed to how to address cars without a human driver.
Silicon Valley companies such as Alphabet Inc.'s Google and car makers are forcing regulators' hand as they continue plowing resources into making the vehicles a reality. GM earlier this month unveiled a $500 million investment in Lyft Inc. with an eye toward a service allowing customers to order cars from smartphones and have them appear with no driver needed. Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn pledges to sell a fully autonomous vehicle by 2020. Advanced safety features such as automatic braking, lane-keep assist and adaptive cruise control are already making many vehicles semiautonomous.
"We recognize we have some catching up to do," Mr. Foxx said. But he said driverless cars could have saved more than 25,000 lives last year by eliminating human error.
The real-world ramifications of driverless cars and how they are supervised are already emerging. Regulators, to an extent, want to have guidelines in place before inevitable crashes or other problems with driverless cars spark litigation. "We're entering a new world and we know it," Mr. Foxx said. "We're doing our level best to get ahead of it."
Tesla Motors Inc. this week limited the use of an autopilot system on its electric cars after videos appeared online showing drivers reading while driving or sitting in the passenger seat while the vehicle moves. The changes, made through over-the-air Internet updates, restrict the system unveiled in October to roads with dividers and medians, and keep the car from exceeding a posted speed limit by more than 5 miles an hour.
Volvo Car Corp. last year said it would accept responsibility for accidents caused by its autonomous vehicles, addressing a vexing question of whether a driver should be liable for damage, injuries or deaths resulting from crashes if they aren't at the wheel. California in December proposed holding motorists responsible for obeying traffic laws even if they aren't at the wheel as part of a series of suggested state rules for driverless cars.
While driverless cars are closer to dotting U.S. roads in greater numbers, their widespread use could still be many years away, industry executives say. Americans in 2015 bought a record 17.5 million vehicles, spurred by cheap gas and low interest rates. There are currently roughly 250 million vehicles on U.S. roads with an average age exceeding 11 years.
Replacing that entire car fleet takes two decades, said Mike Jackson, chief executive at AutoNation Inc., the U.S.'s largest dealership chain. Millions of Americans will likely keep driving older cars without the latest autonomous features for some time.
Still, regulators, auto makers, technology companies and dealers believe autonomous features can dramatically improve safety. Such technology serves as a "guardian angel" that can save lives, Mr. Jackson said. "The benefit of autonomous cars is misunderstood," Mr. Jackson said. "It's not the luxury of having this computer drive the car for you. If the computer realizes you're about to do something completely stupid, it will intervene."
Google's autonomous cars have driven 1.3 million miles, the equivalent of 90 years of human driving, John Krafcik, head of Google's self-driving car project, said at a Detroit conference earlier this week.
He said a Google driverless car can make perfect turns out of a cul-de-sac and demonstrated the vehicle's ability to avoid hitting a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck with a broom. "There was no single line of code in our algorithm that specifically predicted that event, but our car still knew what to do," he said.
Toyota Motor Corp. Chief Executive Akio Toyoda, until recently a driverless-car skeptic, said in an interview that the U.S. will likely be the first country to embrace widespread use of autonomous vehicles due to greater investment in technology and infrastructure, and regulations that tend to be more liberal. "The U.S. is a step ahead, maybe two steps," the Toyota family scion said.
Federal guidelines for autonomous vehicles are vital to prevent cars from having to turn off certain functions when crossing state lines to comply with different rules, said Volvo Chief Executive Hakan Samuelsson in an interview earlier this week. "If the legislation on the local level tries to be very, very fast without really understanding what the technology could do, it could really slow things down," he said.
As part of the effort to get a handle on autonomous vehicles, U.S. regulators within six months plan to issue recommendations to state authorities on the most crucial guidelines for self-driving cars.
Regulators also plan to weigh whether to seek new powers from lawmakers to address autonomous vehicles.
California, Nevada, Florida and Michigan have laws regulating the testing of autonomous cars. But Google and some auto makers have pushed back on the rules, claiming they do more to inhibit tests than assist them. Google has argued that autonomous vehicles shouldn't require additional regulations and only need government certification since they follow traffic laws better than humans.
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