Google’s self-driving cars draw legal questions, skepticism
Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning that society has only begun wrestling with the changes required in a system created a century ago to meet the challenge of horseless carriages.
What happens if a police officer wants to pull one of these vehicles over? When it stops at a four-way intersection, would it be too polite to take its turn ahead of aggressive human drivers (or polite robots)? What sort of insurance would it need?
These and other implications of what Google calls autonomous vehicles were debated by Silicon Valley technologists, legal scholars and government regulators recently at a symposium sponsored by the Law Review and High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University.
As Google has shown, computerized systems that replace human drivers are now largely workable and could greatly limit human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries that now occur each year on U.S. roads.
Such vehicles also hold the potential for greater fuel efficiency and lower emissions. But questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation have yet to be addressed, and speakers suggested such challenges might pose far more problems than the technological ones.
Major automobile makers have already deployed advanced sensorbased safety systems that assist and, in some cases, correct driver actions. But Google’s project goes further, transforming human drivers into passengers, coexisting with conventional vehicles driven by people.
Last fall, Sebastian Thrun, director of Google’s autonomous vehicle research program, wrote the project had achieved 200,000 miles (321,869 kilometres) without accident, under computer control.
Google and automakers have been lobbying to permit autonomous vehicles on the roads.
Nevada became the first state to legalize driverless vehicles last year, and similar laws have been introduced in legislatures in Florida and Hawaii. Participants at the Santa Clara event said a similar bill would soon be introduced in California.
The U.S. federal government does not have enough information to determine how to regulate driverless technologies, said O. Kevin Vincent, chief counsel of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But he added:
“We think it’s a scary concept for the public. If you have two tons of steel going down the highway at 60 miles an hour a few feet away from two tons of steel going in the exact opposite direction at 60 m.p.h., the public is fully aware of what happens when those two hunks of metal collide and they’re inside one of those hunks of metal. They ought to be petrified of that concept.”
And despite Google’s early success, technological barriers remain. Some of the most trivial tasks for human drivers —such as recognizing an officer or safety worker motioning a driver to proceed in a different direction — await a breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
Even after intelligent cars match human capabilities, significant is- sues would remain, suggested Sven A. Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. Today, human drivers frequently bend the rules by rolling through stop signs and driving above speed limits, he noted; how would a polite and law-abiding robot vehicle fare against such competition?
“Everybody might be bending the rules a little bit,” he said. “This is what the researchers are telling me — because the car is so polite it might be sitting at a four-way intersection forever, because no one else is coming to a stop.”
Questions of legal liability and insurance are also unknown territory. There will also be unpredictable technological risks, participants said. For example, future autonomous vehicles will rely on global positioning satellite data and other systems vulnerable to jamming by malicious computer hackers.
Several participants suggested autonomous driving could use a more consumer-friendly name. Some called the definition into question.
“It won’t truly be an autonomous vehicle,” said Brad Templeton, a consultant for the Google project, “until you instruct it to drive to work and it heads to the beach instead.”