Are self-driving cars coming sooner than we think?
Cars almost always feature in our visions of the future,聽whether they are flying, talking, or self-driving.
While fully autonomous cars may still be a while off, automakers are steadily removing the human element from the moment-to-moment aspects of driving. As innovation outpaces law, many questions arise about how self-driving cars will function in the existing infrastructure and whether humans are ready for this change.
and already include lane-keeping features that make it possible for drivers to take their hands off the wheel on straight stretches of road. Tesla has said that in the next year its Model S sedan will be able to , and feature to do the same thing.
As more autonomous features are added, however, these cars begin to face legal ambiguity.
鈥淭he federal government largely regulates vehicle design, such as 鈥楧oes it meet crash safety standards,鈥欌�� Bryant Walker Smith, a professor of law and engineering at the University of South Carolina, The states are the ones that have regulated drivers and their behavior, but 鈥渘ow the car is becoming the driver.鈥�
Only California, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, and the District of Columbia have , mainly to encourage product testing. In the absence of regulations, automakers are pushing forward, arguing that the law must allow what it does not expressly prohibit.
And until something actually goes wrong with a self-driving car, there is nothing that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration can do to stop automakers from selling them, say experts.
鈥淚f someone wants to sell a totally automated vehicle today, you could probably get a court to decide there鈥檚 nothing N.H.T.S.A. can do about that until it presents an unreasonable risk to safety,鈥� said an agency spokesman, Gordon Trowbridge,
And it is likely that computer operated vehicles would cut down on the 33,000 car-related deaths that occur in the US each year, as alcohol, drugs, inexperience, speeding, and wet or icy roads.
Yet despite the decades-old fascination with self-driving cars, there remains a certain level of discomfort with giving over the controls of our cars to computers.
鈥淗umans will be much less tolerant of a machine error causing death than human error causing death,鈥� Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist and early investor in Uber, . 鈥淚 would argue that for a machine to be out there that weighs three tons that鈥檚 moving around at that speed, it would need to have at least four nines because the errors would be catastrophic,鈥� he said, referring to a 99.99 percent safety guarantee.
This level of perfection will be difficult to achieve considering that there is a lot more to driving a car than staying in the correct lane. Self-driving cars would, at the very least, have to be able to respond to severe weather and to know to pull over when an ambulance needs to get by.
For now, autonomous feature are meant to give the commuter a more stress-free drive, not to let commuters watch TV while their car drives them to work.
鈥淭his is about making the tedious parts of people鈥檚 drives less stressful,鈥� , a spokesman for Volvo, which is introducing a hands-free feature in its XC90. 鈥淲e鈥檙e not talking about a driver simply checking out and not paying attention.鈥�
