Mounting concerns over self-driving cars — headlined by allegations that autonomous vehicle maker Cruise misled the California Department of Motor Vehicles about an accident in San Francisco that seriously injured a pedestrian — have some people questioning whether the state needs new laws and new watchdogs to govern the technology’s rapid expansion.
City streets are serving as testing grounds for hundreds of self-driving cars in California, despite ongoing safety concerns and gray areas surrounding law enforcement’s ability to cite robot cars when they violate traffic laws.
The director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University, Irina Raicu, expressed concern by stating that we are still struggling to understand whether driverless cars are truly safer than human drivers and in what ways they might not be.
Autonomous vehicle makers argue that their cars need to keep logging miles to improve the technology and make them safer. However, much of the testing happens on city streets alongside human drivers and pedestrians, and there’s still much we don’t know about how the vehicles perform.
“It seems like while they make fewer of the kind of mistakes that we see from human drivers, they make interesting new kinds of mistakes,” Raicu said. “It has the feel of a human subject mass experiment, right? Without the kind of consent that we usually want to see as part of that.”
Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara UniversityMichael HornDriverless double standard
Driverless cars have been documented running red lights, blocking emergency responders and swerving into construction zones.
NBC Bay Area has learned that when driverless cars break the rules of the road, there’s not much law enforcement can do. In California, traffic tickets can be written only if there is an actual driver in the car.
An internal memo from San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, obtained by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit, instructs officers that “no citation for a moving violation can be issued if the [autonomous vehicle] is being operated in a driverless mode.”
Scott added, “Technology evolves rapidly and, at times, faster than legislation or regulations can adapt to the changes.”
While autonomous vehicles in California have received parking citations, the state’s transportation laws appear to leave driverless vehicles immune from receiving any type of traffic ticket stemming from moving violations.
“I think it sends a message that it’s not a level playing field, that fairness is not the priority,” said Michael Stephenson, the founder and senior attorney of Bay Area Bicycle Law, a law firm that specializes in representing cyclists in accident cases.
Stephenson said that driverless vehicles don’t exactly fit into the state’s current legal framework and that California needs new laws to appropriately govern the evolving technology.
“We’re perhaps trying to shove a square peg into a round hole,” he said.
