Advocates for auto companies and consumer technology firms on Wednesday urged a congressional subcommittee to adopt legislation to advance the development of self-driving cars, saying the U.S. will fall behind competitors, especially China, if the federal government doesn’t take steps in support of fully autonomous vehicles.
John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group that represents most major automakers, said unless the federal government provides some regulatory certainty that vehicle manufacturers will be able to develop and test more self-driving cars and trucks — and eventually market them — more companies may be unwilling to take the financial risk that goes along with doing so.
“If we don’t expand exemptions (for the number of self-driving cars on the roads, limited at 2,500 a year at present) there are going to be fewer companies doing less innovation in the United States,” Bozzella told the House Innovation, Data and Commerce Subcommittee. In his prepared testimony, he pointed to Argo, a self-driving vehicle company supported by Ford and VW, which shut down last year.
General Motors has also been waiting for more than a year for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to decide if it can deploy its new autonomous Cruise Origin to be built at its Factory Zero in Detroit/Hamtramck.
Bozzella, along with Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, another trade group that represents more than a thousand firms engaged in new technology, said autonomous vehicle technology is already remarkably safe and that Congress and regulators shouldn’t use safety concerns as a bar from having NHTSA adopt new standards for driverless cars and putting more on the roads to gather more data, which in turn will make them even safer.
“We can’t wait for them to be perfect, the perfect should not be the enemy of the amazing,” said Shapiro, adding that the deployment of self-driving cars and trucks could eventually save thousands of lives from traffic fatalities.
Legislators including U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Ann Arbor, have proposed legislation to support automakers’ push to develop self-driving vehicle technology at a more rapid pace but it has gone nowhere in recent years after the House passed legislation to do so in 2017. That bill stalled in the Senate.
At the center of the debate is whether current technology that goes beyond driver assistance systems to near- or fully-functioning computer-driven vehicles is safe enough to put more self-driving vehicles on the roads and how strict NHTSA regulations should be set to both protect the public and give automakers enough leeway to develop the still-evolving technology.
Philip Koopman, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, who researches automated vehicle technology, said while self-driving cars have come a long way, especially in navigating city streets, they still have much further to go before they should be widely deployed.
“The reality is that both human drivers and computer drivers will make mistakes,” he said, adding that NHTSA should adopt safety standards in line with those proposed by industry engineers and require additional regulatory oversight instead of the more flexible approach proposed by vehicle manufacturers. “Companies have shown they will be as opaque as we let them,” Koopman noted.
There are indications NHTSA is moving forward with plans to expand the number of self-driving vehicles permitted on American roadways, however. At an industry gathering this month, NHTSA Acting Administrator Ann Carlson said the agency is looking to create a new program in the fall that will allow for more exemptions from federal motor vehicle regulations that specify standards for cars and trucks.
More:GM’s plan to deploy self-driving Cruise Origin on hold as feds weigh exemption request
At Wednesday’s hearing, several members of the subcommittee, including U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, also said that steps need to be taken to restrict the number of automated vehicles made by companies with links to China or its government that are deployed on U.S. roads. Their concern is not only that those companies will gain a technological edge but that devices used to operate the vehicles will gather data on Americans.
Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler.