Congress urged to revive long-stalled debate about regulating self-driving vehicles

WASHINGTON — Advocates for the self-driving vehicle industry on Wednesday warned that years of regulatory inaction is putting American manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage and urged Congress to expand their ability to test and eventually sell autonomous cars and trucks. Currently AV manufacturers can deploy a maximum of 2,500 self-driving vehicles for testing, provided they have permission from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Among the new proposals currently before the committee is one that would provide exemptions for manufacturers to deploy thousands of autonomous vehicles without meeting existing auto safety standards. Gary Shapiro, head of the Consumer Technology Association, told the committee that self-driving vehicles, “are never distracted, never tired, they don’t get drunk and they don’t fall asleep.” But Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., countered that the human driving model at least provides clarity on who to blame and who should pay for the damage. And until we’ve figured that out, this is just a science project.” On General Motors’ earnings conference call Tuesday, Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt said his company’s analysis of the first million miles of autonomous vehicle use shows they had 54% fewer collisions than humans in similar environments, and 92% fewer crashes where the autonomous vehicle was at fault.