Three Major Carmakers Work Together for the Future of Self-Driving Cars
With encouragement from a hands-off federal government, 3 major carmakers are creating a brand new safety group with the Engineering Group SAE International to draft a series of national standards for self-driving vehicles.
Recently, Ford, Toyota and General Motors joined the SAE to establish the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium (AVSC), an exclusive group that will "responsibly evolve" autonomous technology while it's tested, re-tested and auditioned countless times.
AVSC is dealing primarily with Level 4 and 5 automation,which are the most several advanced categories that were previously defined by the SAE and accepted by the industry. The main goal on their agenda is figuring out how to devise technical standards that car manufacturers, suppliers, and developers will adopt universally.
The federal government presently has no statutes on self-driving cars and no plans to restrict or standardize them. Last year, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao introduced the department's 3rd round of voluntary guidelines for self-driving vehicles that would align federal agencies toward the goal of letting carmakers self-police themselves.
Chao reported the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in particular should remove language from current rules that require things like steering wheels, pedals, mirrors and other assorted equipment that tomorrow's automobiles won't use. Despite the lack of more formal rules, she also called for OEMs and tech companies to mitigate the "public's legitimate concerns about the overall safety, security and full privacy of this new technology," which is precisely what the AVSC claims will do.
While most of the states have enacted either legislation or special executive orders on testing self-driving cars, there is no common ground on what is universally considered safe.
To determine new guidelines that everyone can live with, the carmakers need to determine a set of best practices involving passive-safety features, including ABS, airbags, ADAC systems and seatbelts. The United States government has chosen not to evaluate driver-assistance systems (the insurance-industry-funded Insurance Institute for Highway Safety is playing that role) and automakers have so far shown very little interest in making systems such as automated braking function uniformly at a very baseline level.
Highly aggressive first-to-market pushes from companies including Tesla that beta-test automated features on their customers have been greeted with media fanfare instead of any careful analysis. The AVSC isn't addressing these semi-automated systems (Levels 1 through 3) at this point that will become more widespread before fully automated systems are introduced throughout the country.
From this news, all of us at Service King South Ft. Worth in Fort Worth, TX can determine that it will be many more years before national standards are established for self-driving vehicles. The vehicles are ready to roll, but everything else including safety standards will be in flux for quite some time, according to the experts.
Service King South Ft. Worth in Fort Worth, TX 76140
Sources: IIHS and NADA
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