AUTONOMOUS-CAR TESTING REGULATIONS? THEY DON’T EXIST
Shockingly, writes David Booth, in both the U.S. and Canada, a self-driving car can share space with other cars and pedestrians without any real oversight.
As it turns out, Rafaela Vasquez, the “backup” driver of Uber’s self-driving Volvo XC90, was streaming Hulu just before striking and killing Elaine Herzberg as she was walking across Mill Avenue in Tempe, Ariz.
Now, never mind that, according to the Tempe police report, Vasquez had been streaming video for some 42 minutes before the crash. No, the troubling aspect to this first pedestrian death by self-driving car is that, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Volvo’s SUV saw Herzberg 1.3 seconds before she was hit, but the command to brake was ignored because Uber, in a bid “to reduce potential for erratic vehicle behaviour,” had disabled the Volvo’s automatic emergency braking system.
Ignore the fact that the Volvo had 1.3 seconds — actually, closer to six seconds because the on-board radar and lidar first detected the 49-year-old long before she was struck — in which to prevent the collision. Try, if you can, to ignore Uber’s — oh, what are the words? — homicidal callousness at overriding Volvo’s vaunted safety systems for the sake of convenience. The bigger question is who is regulating these self-driving cars as being safe for our public roads?
Each one of us had to be tested before our governments would issue a licence to drive. So what government agency is testing self-driving cars to certify they are indeed as sophisticated and safe as the manufacturers claim? Not one.
Oh, there is a certification process, and anyone wanting to operate an autonomous vehicle needs to get permission from the specific jurisdiction to conduct self-driving experiments on its roads. But no one, other than the manufacturers, actually tests the cars to ensure they meet some minimum self-driving capability safe enough for our roads.
There’s actually a good reason for this, one born out of the fact that, like so many industries upset by radical changes in technology, modern computerization has made a mockery of the rules originally designated to govern what and how we drive.
Automobiles and drivers were, until very recently, two completely separate entities. Thus, because federal governments — both American and Canadian — needed to set minimum vehiclesafety standards so that the cars sold nationally were all uniform, it has been a federal prerogative to set technical standards for motor vehicles throughout North America. Thus the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA) and Transport Canada govern the implementation of safety systems throughout the land.
On the other hand, individual states and provinces have the responsibility for driver licensing. Thus have individual states and provinces the jurisdiction to set individual age standards and teaching, testing and graduatedlicensing requirements.
I think you can see where this is going, namely the difficulty, when car and driver are one and the same, of determining who is in charge of what. It was all so very easy before: The federal government had the responsibility to ensure the car had brakes while the state/provincial governments had the responsibility of ensuring said brakes were properly applied. Now where one jurisdiction ends and another one begins is a little less clear.
What appears to be the solution is that the federal governments set out the technical requirements to be considered self-driving — including defining various levels of autonomy — and then automakers, et al., apply to provinces and states to operate their autonomous automobiles on the roads. In the U.S. the NHTSA sets out guidelines in Automated Driving Systems 2.0: A Vision for Safety that the states are supposed to ask those looking to test their autonomous vehicles to comply with. In practice, there are significant differences as to who’s responsible for what.
For instance, according to the Brookings Institution, Tennessee designates the autonomous driving system (ADS) as the “vehicle operator,” while Texas’s SB 2205 says it’s the “natural person” sitting in the driver’s seat. Georgia complicates it even further by defining the operator as the person who engaged the ADS (which, in fact, says Brookings, could be a fleet operator nowhere near the car).
Transport Canada has yet to issue a comparable policy-guidance document for autonomous automobiles, so provinces are left to themselves in setting guidelines. In the meantime, Ontario — the only Canadian jurisdiction so far to issue a policy and regulations on autonomous vehicle testing — is setting standards for licensing and insurance while looking to American regulations for technical guidance.
How do you test for all of the crazy situations — the Waymo car that encountered a woman in a wheelchair chasing a duck across an intersection, for instance — that cars, computerized or human-driven, will someday encounter?
In other words, individual testing of the technologies that we allow to prowl our streets may be impossible.
Self-driving requirements might not be quite the Wild West some are making it out to be, but it would appear licensing autonomous automobiles is yet another area where the speed of technological development is outpacing our governments’ abilities to regulate it.