As Self-Driving Cars Near, Washington Plays Catch-Up
For years, the race to create fully autonomous vehicles went mostly unnoticed by federal lawmakers, who tended to speak of self-driving cars (if they spoke of them at all) as something out of “The Jetsons.” It was an odd blind spot, given how close companies in Silicon Valley
and Detroit were to creating mass-market autonomous vehicles, and how many important industries — taxi driving, long-haul trucking and shipping among them — stood to be drastically transformed as a result.
The bill, known as the Highly Automated Vehicle Testing
and Deployment Act of 2017, is the first major federal effort to regulate autonomous vehicles, and would give the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration broad oversight of the self-driving car industry.
Last month, a bipartisan group of senators announced
that it was working toward its own version of an autonomous vehicle bill, which would prioritize “safety, fixing outdated rules, and clarifying the role of federal and state governments” in regulating self-driving cars.
While engineers race to bring self-driving cars to market, Silicon Valley companies and Detroit automakers have been lobbying Congress for federal laws
that would replace many of the existing state-by-state regulations and allow them to experiment more freely with new autonomous systems.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, recently told a National Governors Association meeting
that within 10 years he expected “almost all” new cars produced in the United States would be fully autonomous.
California’s Department of Motor Vehicles recently released a series of proposed rules,
and the state is beginning to modify its roads to make them easier for the sensors in autonomous vehicles to analyze.
Some experts predict it could be a decade or longer until cars are capable of full autonomy in every driving condition,
but several major auto manufacturers, including Ford and Toyota, say they’re on track to release cars capable of limited autonomy within the next four years.
