After California proposed banning driverless cars without a human driver, we all wondered what would happen to Google’s self-driving cars, many of which feature no steering wheel or brakes. Now, the U.S. government has thrown the tech giant a bone, saying Google’s computers can be considered the legal driver of a car.
In a letter to Google, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attempted to interpret a number of provisions of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards as they apply to Google’s autonomous cars.
“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the SDS [self-driving system], and not to any of the vehicle occupants,” the letter read. “We agree with Google its SDV [self-driving vehicle] will not have a driver in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years.”
The conclusion is good news for Google, which submitted a proposed design back in November for a self-driving car that has “no need for a human driver.” In January, the U.S. government hinted it would waive some current rules in order to help accelerate driverless car technology. It also announced it would invest $4 billion to assist the rollout of self-driving cars over the next decade.
“If no human occupant of the vehicle can actually drive the vehicle, it is more reasonable to identify the ‘driver’ as whatever (as opposed to whoever) is doing the driving,” the letter continues.
The announcement comes at a feverish time for autonomous cars. Some companies have predicted key self-driving technologies would come our way by 2020, and Elon Musk said late last year a fully autonomous Tesla car would be ready in “approximately two years.”
Source: Reuters, NHTSA
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