Google has spun off its self-driving car programs into a subsidiary called Waymo (which is apparently short for “a new WAY forward for MObility”), and Forbes celebrates by claiming that this is “waymo” than just a car. In fact, the real significance is that, by moving self-driving cars out of the company’s X Lab research division, Google is signaling that its technology is sophisticated enough that it is ready to start working on sales and not just research.
Uber has gotten headlines by starting a self-driving car-sharing service in San Francisco without getting permission from the state. This was supposed to be similar to the service it has going in Pittsburgh, where it is legal. The state of California immediately ordered Uber to shut down its service. (When someone documented Uber vehicles running red lights, the company blamed it on the drivers, not the self-driving technology.)
This is ironic because California’s self-driving car law was passed at Google’s instigation to allow for experiments like this. But the state passed regulations that were stricter than Google expected, so now even Google is doing most of its experimentation in places like Texas, which hasn’t passed a self-driving car law. Legal scholars say that operating a self-driving car is legal in most states so long as a licensed driver is behind the wheel ready to take over if necessary (which is how Uber is running its trial in Pittsburgh and planned to do it in San Francisco). But the California law is much more stringent.
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Google’s goal was to establish a path to allow for self-driving cars without a licensed driver and, eventually, without the option of humans taking over at all. Instead of creating this path, California’s rules put up a roadblock essentially prohibiting such cars.
Meanwhile, people continue to confuse connected vehicles with autonomous vehicles. As the Antiplanner has noted before, and my friend Robert Poole has noted more recently, they are two different technologies, and none of the autonomous vehicle maker that I know of–including Ford, Google, Mercedes, Nissan, and Volkswagen–are relying on connected vehicle technology to make their self-driving cars work.
Connected vehicles, which would not only be able to communicate with each other but also to infrastructure such as traffic signals, raise legitimate concerns about privacy, hackers, and government intrusions into people’s mobility. Autonomous vehicles shouldn’t be vulnerable to these issues so long as they do not incorporate connected vehicle technologies. While I can see some manufacturers offering connectivity as an option, I do not want to see the federal government mandating that all new vehicles include such technology. The Obama administration was planning on that next year; we can hope the Trump administration will overturn that plan.
Sorry, Virginia, they’re all going to be connected in ways that raise privacy and security concerns. Maybe not in the, “all our cars talk to each other to avoid each other and traffic,” way the Antiplanner is thinking of, but I guarantee you they’ll all be capable of connecting to the internet in order to receive software updates and send monitoring data back to the manufacturer.
Anyone making autonomous vehicle control software would be crazy to not collect as much data possible about its performance in the real world.
It’s unlikely that Elaine Chao will be ramming lots of AV regulation down states’ throats. As usual politicians, bureaucrats, and big $$$ manufacturers will conspire to erect all sorts of expensive regulations for their benefit but Chao has the gravitas to resist such attempts at regulatory capture.
At this point it’s probably best to resist any federal involvement of any kind in AVs. Big manufacturers will haul out the old canard about how a “messy patchwork of state laws” is stifling innovation but in fact that’s exactly what we need at this stage of AV development: 50 laboratories of democracy. If CA elects to virtually shut down AVs and TX gives them freer reign, then we’ll see which approach is more successful.
For the Trump administration the imperative is to separate intentions from results, to counter statists from demanding sweeping federal regulation. The press will seize on every AV fatality. The administration has to pound away at the other 90-some fatalities that happened the same day as a result of human driver error, and insist that AV regulation remain the purview of state government and not some massive, corrupt federal bureaucracy.
There’s nothing stopping states agreeing to harmonize regulations and allow AVs from adjoining states to cross state lines, if they wish. I imagine in time they will agree on best practices and eventually AV regulations will be standardized amongst the various states.