Autonomous Car Guidelines Hailed for Spurring Innovation, Heeding Safety Fears

“No specific federal legal barrier” prevents the sale of any autonomous vehicle that complies with existing federal safety standards and “maintains a conventional vehicle design,” said the Department of Transportation and its National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a long-awaited guidelines report, released Tuesday, on promoting the safe development and testing of self-driving cars.

But at the core of the guidelines report is a 15-item “safety assessment” checklist covering broad areas from data-sharing and cybersecurity protections to privacy concerns and ethical considerations that developers of self-driving cars will be expected to follow. NHTSA will ask autonomous car makers to submit voluntary “safety assessment letters” modeled after the 15-item checklist so the agency can gauge how closely its guidelines are being followed, the report said. NHTSA may opt to make the reporting functions mandatory in future rulemakings, the agency says.

The self-driving car “raises more possibilities and more questions than perhaps any other transportation innovation under present discussion,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx in an introduction to the guidelines. Questions such as whether autonomous cars will fully replace the human driver and the “ethical judgments” the technology will be called on to make “will require longer and more thorough dialogue with government, industry, academia and, most importantly, the public,” Foxx said. Comments on the guidelines are due 60 days after an NHTSA notice is published in the Federal Register. Release of the guidelines, which was expected this summer, met Foxx’s recently stated goal of seeing them come out while most of the U.S. was still enjoying warm weather (see 1608250049).

The guidelines spell out “an ambitious approach” to speed the “revolution” in self-driving cars, which the agency calls “HAVs,” for highly automated vehicles classified as falling within the Society of Automotive Engineers scale of Levels 3 through 5. NHTSA “must rapidly build our expertise and knowledge to keep pace with developments, expand our regulatory capability, and increase our speed of execution,” the agency said. The guidelines are “an important early step in that effort,” it said.

Of the 15-item safety assessment reports that NHTSA will collect, the need for “data recording and sharing” tops the list, the guidelines said. “Manufacturers and other entities should have a documented process for testing, validation, and collection of event, incident, and crash data, for the purposes of recording the occurrence of malfunctions, degradations, or failures in a way that can be used to establish the cause of any such issues.”

Under the broad domain of HAV “system safety,” manufacturers also “should follow a robust design and validation process based on a systems-engineering approach with the goal of designing HAV systems free of unreasonable safety risks,” the guidelines said. “This process should encompass designing the intended functions such that the vehicle will be placed in a safe state even when there are electrical, electronic, or mechanical malfunctions or software errors.”

NHTSA also wants manufacturers to “follow a robust product development process based on a systems-engineering approach to minimize risks to safety, including those due to cybersecurity threats and vulnerabilities,” guidelines said. “This process should include systematic and ongoing safety risk assessment for the HAV system, the overall vehicle design into which it is being integrated, and when applicable, the broader transportation ecosystem." Manufacturers should design HAV systems that “enable quick response to and learning from cybersecurity events,” they said.

Various decisions that an HAV’s computer “driver” may make undoubtedly “will have ethical dimensions or implications,” said the guidelines. “Different outcomes for different road users may flow from the same real-world circumstances depending on the choice made by an HAV computer, which, in turn, is determined by the programmed decision rules or machine learning procedures.” Safety, mobility and legality are the “three reasonable objectives of most vehicle operators,” they said. “In most instances, those three objectives can be achieved simultaneously and without conflict. In some cases, achievement of those objectives may come into conflict.”

For example, most states have a law prohibiting cars from crossing a double-yellow line in the center of a roadway, the guidelines said. What should an HAV do when another vehicle is blocking the HAV’s travel lane? “An HAV confronted with this conflict could resolve it in a few different ways, depending on the decision rules it has been programmed to apply, or even settings applied by a human driver or occupant,” the guidelines said. The resolutions to such conflicts “should be broadly acceptable,” the guidelines said, without suggesting specific resolutions.

The Department of Transportation “strongly encourages” the states “to allow DOT alone to regulate the performance of HAV technology and vehicles,” the guidelines said in a section on “model state policy.” If a state wants to pursue HAV “performance-related regulations,” it should “consult with” NHTSA and base its regulations on the agency’s vehicle performance guidelines, they said.

NHTSA wants states to “evaluate their current laws and regulations to address unnecessary impediments to the safe testing, deployment, and operation of HAVs, and update references to a human driver as appropriate,” the guidelines said. “States may still wish to experiment with different policies and approaches to consistent standards, and in that way contribute to the development of the best approaches and policies to achieve consistent regulatory objectives.” Though there “need not be uniformity or identical laws and regulations” in all states, there should be “sufficient consistency of laws and policies to avoid a patchwork of inconsistent State laws that could impede innovation and the expeditious and widespread distribution of safety enhancing automated vehicle technologies,” the guidelines said.

Preliminary reaction was generally positive. It's “a crucial next step in establishing a strong federal role in providing oversight and guidance to the states” on autonomous cars, said CTA President Gary Shapiro in a statement. The guidelines offer “a welcome approach to avoid patchwork laws that might inhibit innovation or make the latest cutting-edge technology inaccessible to consumers,” Shapiro said.

NHTSA’s 15-point safety guidelines are “a proactive approach that will drive innovation and bring self-driving cars to a road near you,” said Vince Jesaitis, Information Technology Industry Council vice president, in a blog post headlined "Self-driving Cars Get the Green Light from Uncle Sam." NHTSA's guidelines "also end the uncertainty and regulatory patchwork which has hung over autonomous vehicles and their development beyond science-fiction and into reality,” said Jesaitis. “It appears to take some very positive steps to provide certainty for the private sector to move forward and increase the commitment of significant resources needed to usher in the life-improving benefits this transformational technology offers for safety, efficiency, and quality of life.”

As the U.S. moves closer “to a future of automated vehicles, regulators will need to oversee advancements in safety technology without hampering innovation,” said Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., in a statement. NHTSA’s guidelines are “an important step acknowledging the need for federal officials to collaborate effectively with manufacturers and state authorities to ensure we see the tremendous opportunities offered by these vehicles,” Thune said.

Consumer Watchdog is pleased NHSTA “appears to have heeded many concerns raised by safety advocates,” the group said of the guidelines. But the group is still studying the “model state policy” section of the report and has “concerns about possible pre-emption of strong state regulations like those in California” in NHTSA’s zeal to avoid a patchwork of state laws on autonomous vehicles. “This isn’t the checkered flag to industry to irresponsibly develop robot cars that we had feared,” said John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project director, in a statement. “It’s not a secret, cozy process with the manufacturers, but includes a real commitment to transparency and public involvement. The administration clearly heard the concerns raised by safety advocates and has addressed many of them."