Automobile manufacturers and technologies According to a new framework released by the U.S. Department of Transportation today, developers will no longer need to report more detailed public crash information to the federal government.
These moves offer a boon to manufacturers of self-driving cars and the wider automotive technology industry, which complains that the federal collapse is too heavy and redundant. But the new rules will limit information from those who monitor and learn about self-driving cars and driver assistance capabilities, technologies that are deeply intertwined with public safety, but which companies will often avoid the public eye because they involve proprietary systems that companies spend billions of dollars to develop.
The government’s new orders limit “one of the only sources of publicly available data that we have on incidents involving Level 2 systems,” says Sam Abuelsamid, who writes about the self-driving-vehicle industry and is the vice president of marketing at Telemetry, a Michigan research firm, referring to driver-assistance features such as Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised), General Motors’ Super Cruise, and Ford’s Blue Cruise. He noted that these events were just “increasingly common”.
The new rules allow companies to avoid publicly viewing some crash details, including the automated version involved in the incident and the “narrative” around the collision, citing such information that contains “confidential business information.” If the incident does not involve an autonomous vehicle crash or hit another vehicle or object, there is no longer a need to report a crash caused by self-driving car developers, such as Waymo and Zoox. (For example, Nix in May, a federal public report about some small fenders, in which one of the driveways hits a Waymo.
In the change, manufacturers of advanced driver assistance functions (such as fully autonomous driving) must report a crash, only when it causes death, hospitalization, airbag deployment, or strikes against “vulnerable road users” (such as pedestrians or cyclists) are no longer required to report the vehicle involved to tow only a crash.
“This really could shut down a lot of other reports,” William Wallace said. “It’s a big carving.” These changes are moving in the opposite direction that their organization embraces: federal rules that fight against the “major event” trend among manufacturers of advanced vehicle technology.
The new DOT framework will also allow automakers to use more vehicles to test autonomous driving technology that do not meet all federal safety standards during the new exemption process. The process is currently used for foreign vehicles imported to the United States, but is now expanding to domestically manufactured tools, which will include an “iteration review” that “takes into account the overall safety of the vehicle.” The process can be used, for example, to approve faster without steering wheels, brake pedals, rearview mirrors, or other typical safety features, without much meaning when the car drives a computer.
