SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A new bill is being written with input from both the House and Senate in the hopes of speeding the introduction of self driving vehicles on the roads.
Similar legislation last year (the SELF DRIVE Act in the House and the 'AV START Act' in the Senate) failed to pass even though amended repeatedly in response to Democrat
raised objections that it didn’t do enough to address safety concerns. The hope is that with Democrats now in control of the House, a bill can be crafted from the start that addresses those concerns.
The new bipartisan legislation will also address
what these vehicles look like in the future, allowing for automakers to manufacture vehicles without steering wheels, gas, and brake pedals so long as the Department of Transportation exempts them from the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS).
Movement on this front was unexpected considering that
the AV industry has mostly dialed down its efforts in Washington. According to Politico, lobbying on driverless cars dropped 35 percent between the end of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019.
Perhaps due to focusing on technical challenges.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 29 2019, @03:12AM (1 child)
I follow several auto industry trade magazines/journals. After a few years of rosy and often ridiculous predictions, in the last few months some doubt about the autonomous future has crept into editorials and articles. With the exception of Musk/Tesla, I get the impression that the word has finally gotten through to the PR flacks (and the VC's too?) that this is a very hard problem and it's going to roll out slowly, initially in very limited areas.
Meanwhile, there have been a couple of bits of real (not vapor) news recently,
https://www.autonomousvehicleinternational.com/news/legislation/bosch-and-daimler-set-to-launch-fully-autonomous-valet-service-in-stuttgart.html [autonomousvehicleinternational.com] [autonomousvehicleinternational.com]
If you own a Mercedes with the correct options, you can use a smart phone to hand your car off to an automated parking garage, where the car and garage work together to get the car parked/retrieved. Conveniently the parking structure serves the Mercedes-Benz Museum, but they are looking to expand to other sites.
In the Mercedes article there is a reference to "SAE Level 4" -- the SAE definitions for different amounts of driver assistance were recently updated and are somewhat more detailed than the earlier version:
https://www.sae.org/news/press-room/2018/12/sae-international-releases-updated-visual-chart-for-its-%E2%80%9Clevels-of-driving-automation%E2%80%9D-standard-for-self-driving-vehicles [sae.org] [sae.org]
(page down for the annotated chart).
Now we wait to see what the hype artists will start overselling next.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 29 2019, @05:37AM
IMO, we are several decades away from reliable, fully autonomous vehicles. Building a vehicle today with no driver controls at all is criminally stupid. It's going to take a few disasters to convince lawmakers of that, though. We need to re-introduce Murphy to the decision makers. There are pages and pages of Murphy's laws and corolaries available to peruse on the internet. But, whatever can go wrong, will go wrong, and probably at the most inconvenient of times.
Imagine if Hurricane Katrina had been dealt with, with mostly autonomous vehicles. Then, imagine that something knocked out 25%, or 50%, or even 100% of those vehicles. Like, maybe a bad update that had been scheduled at the most inopportune time during the evacuation? Wow - millions of vehicles suddenly just die, leaving people stranded in the lowest of the lowlands, watching the waters rise around them.