Makers of driverless cars want Congress to free them from state safety standards
A Waymo self-driving autonomous vehicle in Tempe, Ariz., on February 3.
in addition to overseeing crash investigations, safety inspections, and traffic laws.
The START Act, authored by Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., is meant to set some basic safety and transparency requirements at a time when the vehicles are still being developed. Like the House measure, it enables the preemption of state laws regulating the design and performance of autonomous vehicles.
“Self-driving cars represent the moon shot for artificial intelligence and machine learning,” said Sen. Gary Peters, D-mich., a co-sponsor of the bill. “When (autonomous vehicles) can pilot through a city like Washington, D.C., using (artificial intelligence), that means that AI is ready for prime-time in every single industry in America. It will change everything in this country.”
Peters and other lawmakers bullish on the technology are aiming to move the START Act to the Senate floor by the end of the summer. The bill passed the Senate Commerce Committee by voice vote last fall.
In March, Uber and Waymo wrote a joint letter urging the Senate to pass the bill. The companies argued that it would “protect against a patchwork of regulations that could only delay or complicate the deployment of this important technology.”
Facing legislative uncertainty on the federal level, many states have begun to create their own regulations for autonomous vehicles. According to the National Conference of State
Legislatures, 29 states and Washington have enacted legislation related to driverless cars.
In Florida, autonomous vehicles can legally operate on public roads without a driver present. In 2015, Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona signed an executive order establishing safety guidelines for the testing of autonomous vehicles and enabling pilot testing programs. The Republican governor updated the order earlier this year to specify that driverless cars must comply with state traffic and safety laws, among other requirements.
But a coalition of lawmakers and consumer advocates warns that the measures leave the public at risk. They worry that the bills fail to protect passengers from hackers, who could conceivably tap into the systems that control the cars and cause chaos. They also say the bills lack a standard “vision test” to ensure that computer vision systems can properly perceive and react to unexpected obstacles, much in the way that passing a vision test is required to obtain a driver’s license.
A March letter drafted by five Democratic senators – including Feinstein, who represents many tech companies – warned that the Senate bill “indefinitely preempts state and local regulations even if federal safety standards are never developed.” While the bill addresses the deployment of high-level automated vehicles, they wrote, it does not set adequate standards for partially automated vehicles, which have been involved in recent accidents.