John Krafcik, CEO of Google Self-Driving Cars, told a Washington audience in May that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) needs to update its federal safety standards if autonomous vehicles are to reach the market as quickly as companies like Google hope they will.
He gave the example of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS), which requires turn signals to be "self canceling" by motion of the steering wheel. Self-driving cars won't have steering wheels, but they will have turn signals, and the technology is already there, added Krafcik, to produce turn signals that operate independent of a steering wheel.
So a self-driving car will never meet that particular FMVSS, unless NHTSA changes it. "We want to see the NHTSA allow us to use technology that is equivalent to what is required by the FMVSS," he said.
He underlined the need for federal policies on self-driving cars by warning of the patchwork of state laws that could grow up around autonomous vehicles. "There are some well-intentioned ideas there but there is a real irony that those states, in putting their policies together, don't realize they are causing some harm," he said.
NHTSA, an office within the Department of Transportation, is expected to issue draft guidance this summer specific to the interplay between state and federal laws. Google has complained, for example, about California draft regulations for operation of autonomous vehicles that specifically exclude fully self-driving cars. Further, in the past two years, 23 states have introduced 53 pieces of legislation that affect self-driving cars – all of which include different approaches and concepts.
"Five states have passed such legislation, and although all were intended to assist the development of the technology in the state none of those laws feature common definitions, licensing structures or sets of expectations for what manufacturers should be doing," said Chris Urmson, Director, Self-Driving Cars, Google, when he testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in March. "If every state is left to go its own way without a unified approach, operating self-driving cars across state boundaries would be an unworkable situation and one that will significantly hinder safety innovation, interstate commerce, national competitiveness and the eventual deployment of autonomous vehicles."
However, at a conference in Detroit on June 8, Mark Rosekind, the NHTSA administrator, indicated that the upcoming guidance would not restrict state regulation of autonomous vehicles.
Krafcik's remarks in May were during a panel discussion at a conference organized to receive a new report from the Energy Security Leadership Council (ESLC) called The National Strategy for Energy Security: The Innovation Revolution. The report calls for the creation of a federal program to address autonomous vehicle liability in order to encourage early autonomous vehicle adoption, a solution similar to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation program. Additionally, the ESLC urges more flexible federal safety standards for such vehicles than for traditional cars while also creating a single office at the U.S. Department of Transportation and a White House interagency working group to oversee autonomous vehicle deployment.
It is not clear what the upcoming NHTSA guidance, which will be in draft form, and probably take years to finalize, will say about flexible FMVSS. NHTSA already has issued an interpretation confirming that the BMW's remote self-parking system meets federal safety standards and another from Google affirming that a "driver" in a fully self-driving car can be the self-driving system itself.
Lauren Barriere, a Google Self-Driving Cars spokeswoman, did not respond to a query about whether the company has submitted any specific formal requests to NHTSA for FMVSS revisions regarding Krafcik's allusion to the operation of turn signals. Nor could she say whether anyone in Congress, who Urmson said has a "huge opportunity," introduced Google-advocated legislation permitting deployment of innovative safety technologies that meet or exceed the level of safety required by existing federal standards. But according to the Thomas congressional legislation database, no such bill has been introduced.
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