Trump administration re-evaluating self-driving car guidance

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-selfdriving-idUSKBN1650WA

by devy • 9 years ago

50 88 9 years ago

This is a really difficult situation, in that lowering regulatory overhead would mean getting automated solutions to the public faster, and even if they weren't optimally safe they'd likely be vastly better than human drivers and the sooner we could reap that benefit the better. However, there is a substantial long-term risk to the viability of self-driving cars if any high-profile accidents do happen, because outside of Silicon Valley people generally trust themselves more than technology. So on the other hand it might be better to continue the dangerous status quo for longer, until regulatory framework can assure safety, so as to make the rollout of autonomous cars actually result in adoption of autonomous cars.

Dirlewanger• 9 years ago

Even the most dug-in libertarian can't really argue against these kinds of regulations; automobiles affect everyone within their vicinity. Ideally, all automobile manufacturers should be politely told to shut the fuck up and deal with it, but the realist in me thinks Chao's pockets will be lined with their money quite soon.

liberte822• 9 years ago

You'd be surprised. The problem with regulations is that they have done their job so well that a subset of people now believe they are not necessary and that the market will "take care of itself". See also: vaccines.

slang8004• 9 years ago

Even the most dug-in libertarian can't really argue against these kinds of regulations

Oh, I beg to differ. From a hard-core libertarian perspective, the state has no right to exist, let alone impose arbitrary regulations on business owners. People should be free to trade at will and guarantees on safety should be handled through a contract between the people who are trading. To impose regulations on trade would be an act of aggression.

During vehicle operation, everyone using the road would need to agree on an acceptable level of risk, probably managed by the road owner, not a state. Even if the owner of a particular road refuses to do business with you, you would still be able to buy whatever vehicles you like and operate them on your own property.

stale20026• 9 years ago

Wrong. Self driving cars are already safer than humans. We need to put them on the road, in mass, NOW.

Every year we wait is another million people dead, due to terrible human drivers.

freehunter3• 9 years ago

I've recently been disappointed by the "Uber's car ran a red light!" stories I've been seeing. I know a lot of people hate Uber for various reasons and there's every reason to stay cautious about making sure self-driving cars are predictable and have the right sensors on-board, but imagine if we saw a headline on CNN every time a human-driven car ran a red light.

There's no excuse for a self-driving car to run a red light, but human drivers do it millions of times every day and in most cases when we see it we just shake our heads and say "what is that fool thinking?!" But a self-driving car does it once and it's headline news for months.

eli• 9 years ago

That's a perfectly reasonable argument that Uber could have made. Instead they lied about what happened. Lying to the public (and regulators?) about how safe your vehicles are is, in my opinion, worse than running the light in the first place.

chipgap98• 9 years ago

I think people fear the loss of control that a self driving car poses. If I run a red light and get into an accident I have only myself to blame. If my car does that on its own its completely out of my control and that is pretty terrifying, especially to less tech savvy people. Unfortunately that is how a lot of people look at the issue.

marcell• 9 years ago

Usually when a human runs a red light, they are aware that it's red. Typically the light is just turning red, and they think they can still make it.

For Uber, their car was probably not aware that the light was red, which is more dangerous.

chc2• 9 years ago

I thought what had people upset was that Uber wasn't honest about what happened, not just that the car ran a red.

lg• 9 years ago

if the contents of that fool's head were soon to be snapshotted and uploaded into the minds of hundreds of millions of drivers, it'd be headline news for months too.

Buttons840• 9 years ago

If a person causes a death in an accident we think "that ONE person made a bad decission, but most people would make a better decision".

If a self driving car does the same people will think "ALL cars will make the same bad decission in the same situation". And there is some truth to that.

meredydd• 9 years ago

What fuelled the headlines is that the car ran a light while engaging in legally dubious "cowboy" testing with real passengers.

The human analogy is "<politician> ran a red light while drunk". The point is that they made errors of judgement that then caused this unsafe situation, rather than it being a random accident. (Especially in this case, in which high-handed defiance of both principles and the law is an established narrative.)

Animats3• 9 years ago

It may indicate a repeatable bug. With self-driving cars, you have different problems than with humans. Tesla has three times hit a stopped vehicle projecting into the left edge of a traffic lane. (Those are just the ones for which there's dashcam video.) That's a design failure.

Humans fail in different ways, such as inattention.

pharrington3• 9 years ago

Exactly. AI-driven cars almost certainly are/will be safer than human-driven cars. We don't need them right now. Don't cut corners on safety.

elmar• 9 years ago

"Chao said she was "very concerned" about the potential impact of automated vehicles on employment. There are 3.5 million U.S. truck drivers alone and millions of others employed in driving-related occupations."

that is really the hardest point, when you are trying to reduce unemployment like Trump is.

user5994461• 9 years ago

This is a really difficult situation, in that lowering regulatory overhead would mean getting automated solutions to the public faster,

Never lower regulations when life are on the line.

There is a reason planes and cars don't crash every day, and it's because of these annoying regulations that force tests and QA. You'll never see a summer intern just come in and commits anything he wants and breaks everything. This shit doesn't happen in this line of business.

Regulations is good. You don't want devs being involved in your car with zero regulations to back them.

Cursuviam• 9 years ago

Having read through the previous guidelines, I am not surprised at all at the actions taken. However, the changes taken will likely not change the situation much, as the policy had already been very deferential towards state regulation and self-regulation and really were mostly just guidelines.

AlexC04• 9 years ago

urged companies to explain the benefits of automated vehicles to a skeptical public.

As a "tech guy" myself I have trouble fathoming a position of skepticism around the benefits of self-driving vehicles.

I know it is generally a good idea to be skeptical even as a "devil's advocate" but to my mind, there are so many upsides that it is hard to connect with me?

ThomPete2• 9 years ago

Well 12million jobs in the transportation sector is a pretty good reason to be sceptic if cars get automated.

always_good• 9 years ago

Acknowledging that it's unfortunate to be shifted out of a job is different from being skeptical.

rodgerd• 9 years ago

"Currently very rich people have a lot invested in idustries that will be threatened by this model. Why should we let you exist?"

See also: support for coal industry.

taf2• 9 years ago

I generally agree with your position. But it would be made stronger if you included examples of how it would provide upsides. For example, fewer deaths due to accidents.

  Take for example at least one prominent person who likely would still alive today if all cars were self driving https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash_Jr.

How many countless other lives could have had an impact if only they didnt suffer a similar fate...

Next would be how to measure the impact into real numbers like GDP.

jonlucc• 9 years ago

Well the first weekend of Uber's cars in San Francisco and they had to pull the project because it ran a red light very close to a pedestrian. It only takes a couple videos like that for people to be swayed against statistical information.

rdtsc3• 9 years ago

Driving robots among us who can "decide" to kill has the maximum PR potential for fear and loathing.

It is a bit like terrorism, it is a lot unsafer to step in a wet shower in the morning or well, drive to work, than say getting killed by a terrorist yet look at the wars, waste, money, time spent talking about it.

stale20026• 9 years ago

They don't decide to kill anyone.

The trolley problem would never happen in real life.

In all situations, the safe thing to do in an emergency is to slam on the breaks, and do avoidance, maybe. As well as don't get into these emergency situations in the first place.

102193012• 9 years ago

I'm a skeptic. Even if self-driving vehicles work perfectly, most people desperately want to drive. For many, driving is the only time during the day where they are alone and are in charge.

There is a huge psychological element to why cars are so popular.

[Personally I hate cars altogether and only use public transport.]

frgtpsswrdlame8• 9 years ago

The skepticism enters when we question whether they actually be able to deliver. If companies are actually far less able to build a self-driving car than the image they like to project then the dangers enter.

Also:

Self-driving cars won't start out safer than humans.

Cars which can self drive in some situations but not others will be abused by lazy humans.

Self-driving cars will drive differently than people and thus kill people in accidents which would not have occurred had there been a human driver.

There is no such thing as "mostly autonomous." Humans will not be able to take over and drive at their normal skill level within short time frames.

There has to yet, been no apples to apples comparison of human drivers and autonomous vehicles. Until we get that, why should we let companies use our public roads as their testbed? When Tesla or any other company can prove to me that their cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, I won't oppose them on my roads.

lodi• 9 years ago

Self-driving cars won't start out safer than humans.

All data that I've seen so far supports the conclusion that self-driving cars are already much, much safer than humans.

http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/googles-self-driving-car-is- ridiculously-safe

When Tesla or any other company can prove to me that their cars are safer than human-driven vehicles, I won't oppose them on my roads.

How can they be expected to prove their safety record to you without driving hundreds of millions of miles on public roads? They're already provably safer than humans in artificial "test course" scenarios.

ars• 9 years ago

I have trouble fathoming a position of skepticism around the benefits of self-driving vehicles.

I don't have trouble being skeptical, in fact. I don't believe it will ever work for city streets.

Here's why:

The computer would have to be 99.99999% reliable to do that, and we don't have computers that reliable.

The numbers:

The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).

It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high.

Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.

I.e. 99.99999% of the time, as whole across all [US] humans, people drive in a way that does not cause a fatality.

That's the bar computers have to cross in order to save any lives at all.

majormajor• 9 years ago

Here's a bitterly cynical contrarian view: hope you really really really like getting bombarded with ads even more now that you don't have to pay attention to the road! Marketing opportunities abound! Or, hope you don't mind shelling out for the "ad free experience" every trip.

Here's a less bitter contrarian view:

Self-driving vehicles will be bad for American city development and reinforce existing patterns of inefficiency, waste, and self-segregation.

The reasons I expect this to happen: * People will likely put up with longer commutes if they don't have to pay attention the whole time. * The amount of cars on the road for a given level of congestion will probably increase due to more efficient cross-vehicle coordination and faster reaction times. * I expect most consumers will still prefer to own rather than perpetually rent their vehicle (the average age of cars on the road right now is 11.5 years - that's quite a few years of not making payments compared to being a perpetual Uber-rider), especially given the convenience in family situations (keeping stuff in the car all the time to entertain the kids, keeping the back seats covered to protect from the dog fur and claws, etc).

So those plausible resulting conditions seem likely to lead to less centralized cities, reinforcing a future of inefficiently using a bunch of energy to move small numbers of people individually in cars vs in a denser, older-style urban rail system.

stale20026• 9 years ago

The city problem is easy to solve. Build more houses and apartments.

Cars gave nothing to do with it. The problem is that 10s of millions of people would live in the city if they could, but the government does let them, by putting so many limits on house building.

Turing_Machine• 9 years ago

"Self-driving vehicles will be bad for American city development"

Cities don't have rights. Why are you equating "good for cities" with absolute good?

"and reinforce existing patterns of inefficiency, waste, and self-segregation."

What you call "inefficiency, waste, and self-segregation" other people call "living the lifestyle they want, having a nice yard, and being able to raise their kids away from the dirt, crime, and horrible schools found in the cities".

Efficiency is not the end goal of human life.

If we were really after maximum efficiency, we could have everyone sleep in bunks (maybe even hot-bunk it with three shifts) and eat all their meals in communal chow halls.

But we don't. Why is that, do you suppose?

FullMtlAlcoholc• 9 years ago

Why are so many people blind to the potential pitfalls of self-driving cars?

Considering traditional automakers previous behavior when dealing with defects, this huge rush to get cars connected so that they can hoover up as much data on you and your driving as possible, their general culture of secrecy, a reticence to launch bug bounties and the general closed source nature of their code, you are not at all worried about terrorists or, much more likely, mischief makers hacking your car (or a fleet of the same model with the same vulnerability) for the lulz?

I've said this before, but I'm definitely not getting Mk. 1 of a self-driving car and most likely will never get one unless they open source the code.

rdtsc3• 9 years ago

She said self-driving cars could dramatically improve safety.

Agree, I believe that's a fair assessment and I am glad they are recognizing it.

Animats3• 9 years ago

(I had a long reply on this, but Firefox 51 crashed and lost it. Rewriting).

California DMV's regulations for testing are straightforward. 1) Get $5M in insurance, 2) Report all crashes immediately, and disconnects annually, and 3) only trained drivers associated with the manufacturer can drive. That's what Google wanted, and there are about 20 manufacturers with CA autonomous vehicle testing licenses. Their reports are one of the few objective data sources we have on self-driving cars. (Uber whined about having to report their failures, refused to register, and moved testing out of CA.)

California's deployment regulations are still in flux, although there's a draft version. So far, nobody has applied to deploy production self-driving vehicles in California.

NHTSA started with definitions of levels of autonomy. Informally:

- Level 0 - manual driving

- Level 1 - auto brake or lane keeping, but not both.

- Level 2 - auto speed/brake control and lane keeping (Tesla, BMW, Mercedes, etc.) Driver may have to take over control at any time.

- Level 3 - fully automatic driving on some roads. Driver may have to take control, but not instantly. (Google/Waymo, Volvo)

- Level 4 - fully automatic driving on all roads.

- Level 5 - no driver needed.

NHTSA proposes that at level 3 and above, the manufacturer is responsible for all accidents. Volvo is on board with this, and the US Big Three automakers don't object. NHTSA sees a bright line between levels 2 and 3, and says that at level 2, manufacturers should enforce hands-on-wheel. That's what got Tesla into trouble - weak hands-on-wheel enforcement combined with PR that convinced some drivers that "autopilot" was better than it is.

Urmson, when at Google, said that their testing taught them that humans cannot take over fast enough to deal with automation failures. This echoes what the aviation community has discovered over the years - when someone who isn't actively flying has to take over control, it takes seconds or tens of seconds before they have full situational awareness.

This means the incremental approach of adding more features to assist the driver won't work. Somebody has to be in charge, either the human or the computer. Ambiguity over who is driving leads to accidents. (For an aviation view of this, see "Children of the Magenta", where a chief pilot is talking to his pilots about cockpit aviation dependency.[1])

Congressional hearing last week on self-driving cars.[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10 [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJsRF7NcjpM

unityByFreedom10• 9 years ago

Rewrite! Your expertise is valued here =). Rewrites always come out better anyway.

unityByFreedom10• 9 years ago

Urmson, when at Google, said that their testing taught them that humans cannot take over fast enough to deal with automation failures. This echoes what the aviation community has discovered over the years - when someone who isn't actively flying has to take over control, it takes seconds or tens of seconds before they have full situational awareness.

I'm disappointed that this didn't become the prevailing wisdom for self-driving cars. With the current state of affairs, it seems there's a real risk of a few accidents causing this administration to pull the plug on self-driving altogether until we get a progressive administration again.

Perhaps Urmson ought to have published this research so that others could use their methods and reproduce the results. It seems to me that user-study was the most important part of their research.

Animats3• 9 years ago

It's in his SXSW talk.[1] It's the Google/Waymo and Volvo position, those being the two companies closest to a product.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik

DonHopkins• 9 years ago

My immediate reaction to this web page was EEEEEK!!! SPIDERS!!!!

unityByFreedom10• 9 years ago

What's the difference? The NHTSA guidelines were only suggestions, not laws. They were a heads-up to manufacturers in what the public may demand from companies in the future.

Plus, the states are the ones regulating on this. California is leading the way in independent testing, and they and a handful of others are the only ones who've begun requiring reporting about accidents involving driver-assist and autonomous vehicles.

Am I dumb for saying this administration is unlikely to make federal laws surrounding this technology? Their whole argument is to shrink national government and empower the states to do as they please. Every time they make a national law they shoot themselves in the foot.

thrw99128391• 9 years ago

Always when some interest group senses that a thread does not go their way, they use flagging (of the submission) to censor the unwanted opinions.

Flagging is totally sick on HN.

grzm• 9 years ago

A lot of people on HN are exhausted by a lot of the political submissions. So many of them descend into inflammatory, nonconstructive point scoring, which is the opposite of HN's intent for civil, substantive discussion. People are often flagging regardless of their own political leanings: they don't want HN to have so many political flamewars.

dangrossman• 9 years ago

This is relevant to a lot of the comments, so I'll just make it as a top-level comment. First, two videos of the latest version of the Tesla Autopilot firmware, rolled out to Tesla vehicle owners this week. Each shows the car repeatedly trying to kill its driver:

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYav3_7miIc

2: https://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=zYHrJvXcz6M&u=%2F...

Tesla broke ties with the previous supplier of its driver assist hardware and software last year after serious disagreements over the safety of Tesla's present and future Autopilot systems and how it was being marketed to consumers.

It's now been just a few months, and Tesla's rolled out their own Autopilot software to customers of cars built since the breakup with Mobileye.

That software doesn't have the years of testing the old software did. This one, as you can see in the videos I linked from the latest firmware, does things like drive your car off clearly marked roads inexplicably without warning. It is not acting safer than human drivers would in these situations.

I'm not happy about sharing the roads with cars that may drive themselves into me with no warning that there's anything wrong with what should be a simple lane keeping system. Especially when that system doesn't force the driver to keep their hands on the wheel, when obviously they need to be there with the software in this state.

I want to eventually benefit from the kind of self-driving cars Google is building (Waymo is down to a human temporarily taking the wheel once per 5000 miles of driving on public roads), without the harm of what startups like Tesla can do by putting essentially untested systems on production cars I share the road with.

There must be a regulatory middle ground?

unityByFreedom10• 9 years ago

There must be a regulatory middle ground?

I think there is, I just wouldn't hold my breath for Congress to act on it. California is leading the way on this. Elect the right people there and hopefully that trickles up and across to other states.

btilly• 9 years ago

My fear here is that this is mostly an excuse for established car companies to get Trump to target Tesla. Trump has no particular reason to like electric cars, and established car companies have every reason to fear Tesla. I further suspect that Trump sees being bribed as simply a good business proposition...

Trump administration re-evaluating self-driving car guidance

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