Will the Feds Sideline Driverless Cars?

“Feds ask states to sideline driverless cars,” warns Forbes magazine. That’s actually a bit of a stretch. What the 14-page report from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) “recommends” is that states authorize self-driving cars for testing only, and that states that want to permit “non-testing operation of self-driving vehicles” should at least require that a licensed driver be in the driver’s seat ready to take over if the car reaches a situation it can’t handle. That’s pretty much what is happening anyway.

As Wired magazine notes, “the feds have no clue how to legislate autonomous cars,” mainly because they are “far behind the times . . . with regard to emerging technology.” The feds “want rules, but don’t want to inhibit innovation; they don’t want to pass laws at the federal level (just yet), but don’t want individual states going it alone.”

The federal government once funded research into driverless cars, but ignominiously cancelled the program in 1998 for specious reasons. The administration in 1998, as today, had an anti-auto agenda, so the Antiplanner wouldn’t trust the feds to oversee driverless car programs. They would probably insist on more central control and then do what they could to sabotage the program.

Four states–California, Nevada, Florida, and Texas–have legalized driverless cars, more are on the way. So far as I know only three or four cars have been licensed to operate, mainly for testing purposes, in Nevada. The people designing these cars admit they haven’t solved all of the problems, with road construction detours and snow-covered roads being two unsolved problems that are prominently mentioned, so the NHTSA’s cautions seem completely unnecessary.
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At one time, the Antiplanner thought that federal coordination might be needed to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem that no one would buy self-driving cars until roads were ready for them and no state would make roads ready for them until there were enough self-driving cars on the road to make it worthwhile. But the auto industry (and Google) overcame this by designing self-driving cars that don’t rely on any road infrastructure except what is already there.

The NHTSA document makes several mentions of federal research on “vehicle-to-vehicle” communications. Such communications would offer some opportunities for more central control of self-driving cars. Most auto industry people that I’ve talked with say that such communications might be nice, but they aren’t going to count on them. Instead, they are designing the cars to be completely self-contained.

So does the federal government have any role to play in the self-driving car movement? The NHTSA has previously decided that electronic stability control was such a valuable technology for safety reasons that it mandated that all cars sold since 2011 include it. In the same way, the agency could eventually mandate that all new cars be self-driving. But such mandates may be unnecessary as the eventual cost of adding driverless capabilities is expected to be low.

However, the negative tone of this paper, combined with the administration’s negative attitude towards automobility in general, makes me wary of any federal preemption of state legislation regarding self-driving cars. It would be better to let each state find its own way, relying on such organizations as the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials to provide whatever coordination is needed.