Government Writing 'Basic Framing' for Autonomous Vehicle Regulations, Says DOT's Foxx

Writing rules of the road for autonomous vehicles is more akin to the Declaration of Independence than the Constitution, Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Monday. Responding to a question about driverless cars during a live-streamed event, he said the agency needs more practical experience with driverless cars to ensure it isn't caught "flat footed." This also means thinking about the roles of state governments and industry in relation to the issue, he said. "We’re trying to write the equivalent of the Declaration of Independence with autonomous cars," Foxx responded. "We’re not trying to write the Constitution yet because we don’t know what we don’t know. So there will be more granularity over time. But we can build a basic framing around which that granularity comes into existence." Foxx, who spoke at the Department of Transportation's Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Volpe National Transportation Research Center, generally talked about the role of transportation in the U.S. and legacy of technology, including some comments about autonomous vehicles. Early in his speech, he asked whether drivers even need to be licensed since autonomous vehicles would be performing more of the driving. "So the question is who licenses this? Do we, in the course of approving the physical car, also approve the operational aspects of the software and does that take the place of what the states used to do? Do you need a driver's license to operate an autonomous car? These are questions that are coming faster ... than any of us know." He said the country needs to start making decisions about such transportation-related issues.