Driverless cars: More scrutiny?

Tap brakes on rush to roll out vehicles with few road rules

Crashes involving driverless cars have raised significant safety questions. In March, an Uber driverless car struck and killed an Arizona pedestrian. The National Transportation Safety Board says the system never engaged the brakes in spite of seeing the victim 6 seconds before the crash. People are justifiably concerned.

An American Automobile Association survey shows 73 percent of American drivers are too afraid to ride in a driverless car — up from 63 percent in late 2017. The AAA survey also found the percentage of millennial drivers too afraid to ride in a driverless car jumped from 49 percent to 64 percent since late 2017.

This is a public safety issue. Apparently, the corporate patrons of Florida’s driverless car legislative caucus see this as a public relations problem.

This technology carries great promise to reduce traffic deaths, but we must maintain critical safety standards to carefully develop and safely deploy the concept.

The corporations want deregulation of driverless cars. Their sales pitch for:

A “pro-business and pro-autonomous regulatory climate” translates to lawmakers eliminating critical accountability and liability laws.

A “statewide regulatory framework” over local regulations means Tallahassee knows best when it comes to saying what kind of vehicles can operate in your neighborhood.

“Opening up public roads, infrastructure, and communities to early adoption” of this technology is code for “Robots, start your engines.”

They want Florida to effectively subsidize automakers and tech companies with public roads used by our 20 million residents and 116 million visitors. Floridians carry all the risk yet receive nothing in return — no commitment to build the vehicles here and no jobs created.

In Florida, we are on the cusp of an unregulated free-for-all for driverless cars. Already, driverless cars do not have to carry liability insurance in Florida. A driverless delivery truck (with a human passenger) could speed through a school zone with no accountability and hit a child without having to stop to help. We must update our laws to be prepared for this technology. California has some good laws the driverless car corporations hate. In the Golden State, they have to report the number of miles the vehicles are driven on the state’s roads and the number of times human drivers — acting in a fail-safe role — took the wheel.

Thanks to this common-sense transparency measure, we know in the 2017 reporting year, Mercedes Benz’s three test vehicles drove 1,087 miles with 842 disengagements — that’s a rate of one disengagement every 1.3 miles. General Motors/Cruise driverless cars showed 125,000 test miles during the period. While reporting zero disengagements, those vehicles were involved in 22 crashes — one crash for every 5,682 miles of testing.

These vehicles will be prime targets for hackers who have successfully infiltrated targets like the Pentagon, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In comparison, a driverless car could be an easy target.

Instead of putting the pedal to the floor, it would be better to find out what went wrong in this spring’s fatal crashes, let engineers fix the problem so it never happens again, and make sure safety requirements, incident reporting procedures, and appropriate accountability measures are in place when someone else gets hurt or killed.

Following March’s deadly crash, Uber is closing its Arizona autonomous car operation. In an internal email to employees, the company reportedly said it “intenda to drive in a much more limited way to test specific use cases” and will “continually hone the safety aspects of our software and operating procedures.”

When Uber moved its driverless operation to Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey boasted, “While California puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation, Arizona is paving the way for new technology and new businesses.” Following the fatal accident where driverless software failed to engage the brakes and a pedestrian died, the governor’s message has changed: “As governor, my top priority is public safety.”

With lives at risk, safety should come first. Florida must be careful not to repeat Arizona’s mistakes. COMMENTARY