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posted by takyon on Thursday September 07 2017, @11:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the autonomous-legislature dept.

The U.S. House on Wednesday unanimously approved a sweeping proposal to speed the deployment of self-driving cars without human controls by putting federal regulators in the driver's seat and barring states from blocking autonomous vehicles.

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.

How will the young impress each other with their mad driving skillz now?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday September 08 2017, @04:00AM (2 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Friday September 08 2017, @04:00AM (#564927) Journal

    Oh, come on you can do better than that. The first hack induced head on crash corks the entire highway and the death toll is limited right there.

    You need to worry about bomb laden cars sent on delivery missions.

    Even if you make it so the cars can not travel without a human on board, (which seems unlikely) attackers can spike someone's drink, pour them into a car loaded with explosive and send it where they can do the most damage.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Friday September 08 2017, @05:19AM (1 child)

    by jmorris (4844) on Friday September 08 2017, @05:19AM (#564944)

    Nah, imagine it. A thousand cars in the northbound lane and a thousand in the southbound lane all go to max speed with a mile gap between the groups. They line up in a perfect spacing. Then at the optimal moment all two thousand jump into their opposite and create the mother of all pileups in the median.

    Or a thousand cars jump to a hundred miles per hour and refuse all commands from the mothership. Attacker calls Google and says "send X Bitcoins or we crash them. Tick tock, those batteries won't go that fast for long and we will crash them before that. We picked vehicles with lots of kids and other photogenic passengers."

    And even without a bomb you can do some major damage with enough cars crashing one after the other into something. And they want to put autodrive in big rigs. Fuel tankers anyone? Hazardous cargo? Madness.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @07:43AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 08 2017, @07:43AM (#564973)

      And they want to put autodrive in big rigs. Fuel tankers anyone? Hazardous cargo?

      One fuel tanker and one of those semi-secret transports of fuel rods to and from a nuclear re-processing facility in a head-on crash.