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posted by n1 on Friday August 29 2014, @06:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the see,-no-hands dept.

The Car Connection reports that back in May Google unveiled the prototype of its first autonomous car built in-house but there were a few features that the new model lacked — for example, a steering wheel and brake pedal. Now, California's DMV has told Google to return those accouterments to their traditional locations so that riders can take "immediate physical control" of the car, if necessary. That and other autonomous vehicle regulations kick in on September 15.

"This isn't a huge setback for Google," writes Richard Reed. "After all, the prototypes aren't nearly ready for primetime, they're just being used for tests. Though the control-less models have worked fine on closed tracks, with no accidents to date, they'll eventually be navigating real streets in real traffic, so they'll need to be up to code. In fact, the DMV may tighten up things a bit further next month, when it issues regulations concerning test vehicles on public roads." In the long run, though, we'd expect the DMV to loosen some of these restrictions. It will undoubtedly take years for regulators and the public to begin trusting autonomous cars — and even then, it's likely that automakers will keep some kind of manual override system in place. After all, given the safety records of autonomous cars — records that will certainly improve with the rollout of vehicle-to-vehicle technology — we're hopeful that motorists will (almost) never need to use them.

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by evilviper on Friday August 29 2014, @10:58AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Friday August 29 2014, @10:58AM (#87122) Homepage Journal

    The California DMV has gone so far into revenue-generation mode, that no matter whether someone died, someone failed to pay for towing/storage/repairs/etc., or their own employees screwed up, the DMV still expects the new owner to pay all the past-due registration fees and some very steep penalties. We're talking hundreds and hundreds of dollars. A vehicle that's worth $1,000 is worth precisely nothing if the registration has lapsed. The DMV is single-handedly depreciating the value of a huge number of vehicles in the state, causing many fully-functioning vehicles to be scrapped instead of used, and in the process, taking money out of the pocket of anyone who has a lien on a vehicle.

    And don't get me started on all the fees you have to pay if you repaired a vehicle that was junked in an accident and taken off the books. The CA DMV will not even register a vehicle that was salvaged out-of-state at all. Never-mind all the arbitrary restrictions on registering an out-of-state vehicle in the first 12 months or 7,500 miles.

    And all that's really needed to fix all of this is some sort of automatic non-op... Some way I can put the $20 fee in an account the DMV can access, and get them to automatically non-op the vhicle if payment is going to be even one-day late, instead of imposing crazy fees... It's really cheap insurance in case shit happens with the title transfer (making it impossible to register it on-time), it fails a smog check, or anything else... I'd gladly put down the $20 on every vehicle owned by all my family members. Of course an even better option would be for the DMV to just have modest and reasonable fees for problems like that, or at least less draconian rules about inheriting DMV fees from dead people, debtors, etc.

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