Engineers, safety advocates as well as automakers have a alert message for federal regulators excited to get self-driving automobiles on the road: slow down.
Completely self-driving cars may be the future of the automotive market, however they aren’t yet approximately the demands of real-world driving, a number of people told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration throughout a public meeting Friday.
A General Motors official just recently informed a Senate committee that the automaker anticipates to deploy self-driving cars within a few years through a partnership with the ride-sharing service Lyft. Google, a pioneer in the development of self-driving cars, is pushing Congress to give the NHTSA new powers to approve it special, expedited permission to sell vehicles without steering pedals or wheels.
Numerous of those who attended the conference, the first of two the company has arranged as it works on the standards, described a host of scenarios that self-driving cars still can’t handle:
— Improperly marked pavement, including parking lots and driveways, might foil the technology, which depends on clear lane markings.
— Bad weather condition can disrupt automobile sensing units.
— Self-driving automobiles cannot take directions from a police officer.
— Inconsistent traffic-control devices such as horizontal versus lateral traffic signal.
Up until the technology has advanced beyond the point where normal conditions are troublesome, “it is dangerous, impractical and a significant danger to the public health, security and welfare to deploy them,” stated Mark Golden, executive director of the National Society of Professional Engineers.
Mark Rosekind, the NHTSA’s administrator, stated that automakers are learning from the unexpected scenarios the cars encounter and adjusting their software application. At the same time, he acknowledged that self-driving cars, like other systems that rely on cordless innovation, can be susceptible to hacking.
