US House Unanimously Approves Sweeping Self-Driving Car Measure

Megalith

Megalith

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Congress has united to spread self-driving cars across America: the House of Representatives have passed the Self Drive Act, which lays out a basic federal framework for autonomous vehicle regulation: it officially gives the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration power to regulate vehicle design, construction, and performance, as well as grant many safety exemptions that will make it easier for self-driving cars to hit the road.

...manufacturers seeking exemptions must demonstrate self-driving cars are at least as safe as existing vehicles. States could still set rules on registration, licensing, liability, insurance and safety inspections, but not performance standards. Automakers would have to submit safety assessment reports to regulators, but the bill would not require pre-market approval of advanced vehicle technologies. The measure now goes to the Senate, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers has been working on similar legislation.
 
I thought we were all enjoying not being killed by autonomous vehicles...
 
otherweeb said:
I thought we were all enjoying the hay ride on the 'regulation is evil' bandwagon?
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This may reduce regulation by pre-empting a patchwork of state by state regulation; and may end up with really low bars. Regulation doesn't really count if the Big Players write it, and it doesn't have a significant compliance hurdle.
 
A little concerning..

The House measure, the first significant federal legislation aimed at speeding self-driving cars to market, would allow automakers to obtain exemptions to deploy up to 25,000 vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards in the first year. The cap would rise over three years to 100,000 vehicles annually.
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otherweeb said:
I thought we were all enjoying the hay ride on the 'regulation is evil' bandwagon?
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This is coming from Congress, not self-sprawling bureaucratically generated regulations. It can't be stopped and Congress likes to grow government into new areas. It's how you get kickbacks.
 
otherweeb said:
I thought we were all enjoying the hay ride on the 'regulation is evil' bandwagon?
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It mostly pre-empts regulation and says they have to be less compliant with existing regulations than normal cars. So not exactly ramping up the regulation bandwagon.

Seems more tailored at aiding and abetting legal insider trading of congressional reps.
 
Dead Parrot said:
Trump working with Democrats on the budget, A Bill passing in the House Unanimously. Beginning to wonder if I somehow managed a jump to a different Universe last night while I was asleep.
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Do you think if we wish really hard we can push it into a Marvel universe where the ironman suit is a possibility?

Looking forward to Kyle's home build and review!
 
J3RK said:
I thought we were all enjoying not being killed by autonomous vehicles...
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Nearly 1.3 million people die in road crashes each year, on average 3,287 deaths a day. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled.
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Yeah, we're enjoying it all right.
 
M76 said:
Yeah, we're enjoying it all right.
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Your stat must be for the planet. Not even close to US fatalities. And not relevant unless you ascribe how much activity. For instance there are over 8 milliion cancer deaths per year. What deserves our attention. if context doesn't matter?
 
Ah, the classic, another bad thing makes a who cares argument.

jpm100 said:
Your stat must be for the planet. Not even close to US fatalities.
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And your point is? Some countries have more some less deaths by accidents, which is completely irrelevant to the point that humans are shit at obeying traffic rules. I never said that number is for the US.

And not relevant unless you ascribe how much activity.
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And how much "activity" would make 1.3 million dead people acceptable to you? Because I think until there are no deaths by accidents we need to work on road safety.


For instance there are over 8 milliion cancer deaths per year. What deserves our attention. if context doesn't matter?
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Let's see we have the solution to drastically reduce road accidents caused by human neglect, but we should not do that, because there is cancer? People working on autonomous cars can't do shit about cancer. What a brave new world that would be where every problem but the biggest is ignored. Don't go to the police if you get robbed either, because they can't deal with that, since there must be at least one bigger criminal out there than a burglar!
 
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I wouldn't call autonomous cars the solution to drastically reducing road accidents. Not yet anyway. I would call it progress toward a solution maybe.

There are quite a few things that could easily reduce road accidents. They're not all caused by human neglect.

How about higher quality of road maintenance, including signs, foliage maintenance, visible lines, reflectors lights and other markers, for starters. There are some places here in Washington where one can barely see these things in mid-range conditions. Maybe raise the driving age a little bit, and possibly require slightly more rigorous training.

I would also worry about how well an autonomous car would do in places with bad road conditions.
 
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J3RK said:
I wouldn't call autonomous cars the solution to drastically reducing road accidents. Not yet anyway. I would call it progress toward a solution maybe.

There are quite a few things that could easily reduce road accidents. They're not all caused by human neglect.

How about higher quality of road maintenance, including signs, foliage maintenance, visible lines, reflectors lights and other markers, for starters. There are some places here in Washington where one can barely see these things in mid-range conditions. Maybe raise the driving age a little bit, and possibly require slightly more rigorous training.

I would also worry about how well an autonomous car would do in places with bad road conditions.
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If the entire world car and truck fleet was replaced with autonomous cars and trucks, the world death count would drop to near 0, and that is with current technology. Also it would almost eliminate traffic jams. I would say that it would be a huge benefit to society as a whole to move to autonomous cars. So far there have been 0 deaths caused by the autonomous cars that have already driven millions of miles on public roads.
 
We'll see what it looks like after a few vigorous rounds of hand-fucking, some meetings with lobbyists, and a few lawsuits from the "change is terrible yesterday was best day" crowd.

It seems laws are never quite laws.
 
[21CW]killerofall said:
If the entire world car and truck fleet was replaced with autonomous cars and trucks, the world death count would drop to near 0, and that is with current technology. Also it would almost eliminate traffic jams. I would say that it would be a huge benefit to society as a whole to move to autonomous cars. So far there have been 0 deaths caused by the autonomous cars that have already driven millions of miles on public roads.
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I seriously doubt a rate anywhere near 0 for years. The number of cars has been very limited and usually under strict guidelines and with human oversight. Between bugs in the hardware itself, the hardware microcode, the APIs, between the hardware and vehicle OS, the vehicle OS, the AI functions, security issues, and several other things, we have a long way to go before we will be ready to turn an AI truck loose with 5,000 gallons of gas in a major metro area during rush hour. Ignoring the actual driving part, we still suck at online security, (see Equifax breach as example). Now imagine that AI truck with 5,000 gallons of gas under the control of a bad guy with a beef against company A.

If this bill gets signed, it will be a large step toward testing AI vehicles using a standard code/hardware setup in all 50 states.
 
[21CW]killerofall said:
If the entire world car and truck fleet was replaced with autonomous cars and trucks, the world death count would drop to near 0, and that is with current technology. Also it would almost eliminate traffic jams. I would say that it would be a huge benefit to society as a whole to move to autonomous cars. So far there have been 0 deaths caused by the autonomous cars that have already driven millions of miles on public roads.
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Doubt 0 deaths just due to crazy people jumping into traffic, deer, etc. But still, I think we could substantially lower the current toll with existing technology, to say nothing of future tech. However, think of the knock-on effects of the increased fuel efficiency and the decrease in air pollution resulting from it. It could be pretty substantial.
 
Dead Parrot said:
I seriously doubt a rate anywhere near 0 for years. The number of cars has been very limited and usually under strict guidelines and with human oversight. Between bugs in the hardware itself, the hardware microcode, the APIs, between the hardware and vehicle OS, the vehicle OS, the AI functions, security issues, and several other things, we have a long way to go before we will be ready to turn an AI truck loose with 5,000 gallons of gas in a major metro area during rush hour. Ignoring the actual driving part, we still suck at online security, (see Equifax breach as example). Now imagine that AI truck with 5,000 gallons of gas under the control of a bad guy with a beef against company A.

If this bill gets signed, it will be a large step toward testing AI vehicles using a standard code/hardware setup in all 50 states.
Click to expand...
The security part is easy. Keep the systems in charge with driving the car physically separate from the systems that have access to wireless modems. That would solve 99% of the security problems (and I am not worried about the remaining 1%). Driverless cars are already better than humans at driving and are getting better every day.
 
Can't wait to sue. These's things have a hard time detecting pedestrians and cyclists on a good day.
 
Maybe we should just teach people how to drive better and have harsher regulations against infractions like losing your license for a period of time. People drive like fucking idiots and that problem will be compounded with "autonomous" vehicles where they have to pay attention even less.
 
Good thing those morons in Congress passed this, it's not like there's more important/pressing issues at the moment.
 
We just need to hold out till the rest of the 1st world countries pass their no gas combustion engine laws in the next 15-20 years. Then we can have all the combustion/oil for ourselves!
 
toast0 said:
How many buses have you merged into lately? (yes, that's from 15 months ago, and they haven't managed to do anything that stupid again, yet)
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The average U.S. driver has one accident roughly every 165,000 miles. One crash in over 3 million miles driven (just Google miles driven) is still a hell a lot better then humans (~18 times better).
 
Assuming that is including minor little fender benders once in 165K isn't really that bad IMO. That said once perfected it is hard to see how it couldn't be safer with computers running the show.

We'll see. MS can't even release an update without screwing something up and this is 30+ years after the PC was invented. Long on promises, short on delivery is often the case with tech.

As someone who actually enjoys driving I don't want to sacrifice the freedom in exchange for safety. I would definitely enjoy having the feature built in though particularly on long highway trips. I want to be able to switch off and drive the car when I want to.
 
Dead Parrot said:
Trump working with Democrats on the budget, A Bill passing in the House Unanimously. Beginning to wonder if I somehow managed a jump to a different Universe last night while I was asleep.
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No, the world is still all about the money, this is money and it's why it's getting done.
 
[21CW]killerofall said:
The average U.S. driver has one accident roughly every 165,000 miles. One crash in over 3 million miles driven (just Google miles driven) is still a hell a lot better then humans (~18 times better).
Click to expand...


Self driving cars don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than human drivers.
Insurance cost for human drivers will go up, and insurance costs for self driving cars will go down.
 
"US House Unanimously Approves Sweeping Self-Driving Car Measure"
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Great. Any decisions on the military buildup in Russia or the nuclear standoff with North Korea? Whoops...wrong presidency...sorry.
 
J3RK said:
I wouldn't call autonomous cars the solution to drastically reducing road accidents. Not yet anyway. I would call it progress toward a solution maybe.

There are quite a few things that could easily reduce road accidents. They're not all caused by human neglect.

How about higher quality of road maintenance, including signs, foliage maintenance, visible lines, reflectors lights and other markers, for starters. There are some places here in Washington where one can barely see these things in mid-range conditions. Maybe raise the driving age a little bit, and possibly require slightly more rigorous training.

I would also worry about how well an autonomous car would do in places with bad road conditions.
Click to expand...

It doesn't really matter what you call it. Autonomous driving cars are are already more reliable than human drivers. There are a few tricky situations that they're not suited to handle, but you could always switch to manual mode for that. We're not at the point where autonomous cars can have no manual controls and occupied by people without licenses, but I Think the tesla autopilot which only can drive on a highway is already a huge improvement. One of the biggest causes of death and serious injury is highway pileups. Which can be all but completely avoided with technology already in production cars now.

Not driving in accordance with road conditions is still human error. So lack of road maintenance is not an excuse, except in a few cases where for example a stop sign is stolen.

And the two aren't mutually exclusive. And not even the responsibility of the same people. So the government allowing autonomous cars on the street doesn't mean they can ignore road maintenance from now. This is still the "mention another bad thing" category of arguments.

bucket said:
Can't wait to sue. These's things have a hard time detecting pedestrians and cyclists on a good day.
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And I bet you base that on your extensive experience with the technologies involved in the sensors used in autonomous cars.

toast0 said:
How many buses have you merged into lately? (yes, that's from 15 months ago, and they haven't managed to do anything that stupid again, yet)
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It doesn't matter how many buses one person crashed into. What matters is how often people crash into things on average. How many times have you been attacked by a terrorist? For most people that number is zero. Yet except for a few lunatics nobody thinks we should cut all anti terrorism measures.
 
[21CW]killerofall said:
The average U.S. driver has one accident roughly every 165,000 miles. One crash in over 3 million miles driven (just Google miles driven) is still a hell a lot better then humans (~18 times better).
Click to expand...

The average US driver probably shouldn't be allowed to drive anything bigger than a lawn mower either. The biggest problem is the requirements for a drivers license in this country are pathetically low. 775,000 miles driven myself, zero at fault accidents. The last accident I was in was 7 years ago as I watched some stupid woman with a backup camera smash into my parked car. Apparently reverse is hard in a parking lot. I now just park on the far end of the lot as far from any other vehicles as I can and walk.
 
Prisoner849 said:
Great. Any decisions on the military buildup in Russia or the nuclear standoff with North Korea? Whoops...wrong presidency...sorry.
Click to expand...

whaddayamean? Fire and fury and all that. I think there's a fair chance of bad things happening on the Korean peninsula.
 
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