[ExI] wooohooo! no-steering-wheel cars ok in california

[spike]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-autonomous-vehicle-california-20160
930-snap-story.html

 

 

 


California opens pathway for cars that lack steering wheel




A driver, right, gets his hands off of the steering wheel of an autonomous
vehicle during its test drive in Singapore. (Associated Press)

Associated Press

California regulators have changed course and opened a pathway for the
public to get self-driving cars of the future that lack a steering wheel or
pedals.

It's not going to happen soon, because automakers and some tech companies
are still testing prototypes.

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But, in a shift, the state's Department of Motor Vehicles said in a revision
of draft regulations released late Friday that the most advanced
self-driving cars would no longer be required to have a licensed driver if
federal officials deem them safe enough.

The redrafted regulations will be the subject of a public hearing Oct. 19 in
Sacramento.

The DMV has been wrestling for several years with how to oversee the
emerging technology. In December, it released an initial draft of
regulations that required a licensed driver.

In December, the agency released an initial draft of self-driving car
regulations that required a licensed driver in any self-driving vehicle. The
industry reacted with great disappointment, as the ultimate vision of many
companies is a car that has no steering wheel or pedals. That approach is
based on the argument that humans are not very good at driving, and anyway
cannot be relied on as a backup to a car that typically drives itself but
might fail in a way that required a person in the driver's seat who might be
distracted or even asleep to snap to attention.

The DMV's new document coincides with the release last week of a 112-page
federal proposal under which any self-driving car should pass a 15-point
safety assessment before the public can get ahold of it. Among other things,
the assessment asks automakers to document how the car detects and avoids
objects and pedestrians, how hardened it is against cyberattacks and how its
backup systems will cope should the software fail. In incorporating the
federal approach, California dropped a proposal that a third-party company
certify the safety of self-driving cars.

The new draft regulations released Friday include several other provisions.
Among them is wording that would prohibit advertising vehicles with lower
levels of automation - such as Tesla Motors' Autopilot, which on divided
highways can keep a car's lane, brake and accelerate on the understanding
that a person is paying attention all the time - from being advertised as
"autonomous" or "self-driving."

The company that stands to gain the most from the state's embrace of
vehicles without a wheel or pedals is Alphabet, where the Google
self-driving project envisions cars that allow no human control other than a
start and emergency stop button. A spokesman for the Google project did not
have a comment Friday on the changes to the proposed regulations.

 

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