The US safety regulator has said that the artificial intelligence system driving Google autonomous cars can be considered drivers under the federal law.
Google self driving car
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, of its decision in a previously unreported Feb. 4 letter to the company posted on the agency’s website this week. Google had previously sent a letter to NHTSA, proposing a self-driving car that has “no need for a human driver.”
“NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants. We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a ‘driver’ in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years.”
Google “expresses concern that providing human occupants of the vehicle with mechanisms to control things like steering, acceleration, braking… could be detrimental to safety because the human occupants could attempt to override the (self-driving system’s) decisions,” the NHTSA letter stated.
The legal hurdles for self-driven cars have been very complex with only a handful of states allowing the testing of driverless cars on public roads in the USA. Google has been at the forefront of testing completely autonomous technology, having racked up millions of miles on its fleet of self-driven cars and wants to partner with traditional car makers to use its technology to power their cars. Google wants to bring is as many manufacturers as possible on board; similar to the way Google’s Android operating system powers cell phones from almost all manufacturers across the globe
According to a report, Google self-driven cars reported 13 near misses and 272 failures last year in a span of 2 months between September 24 and November, were the Lexus RX450h hybrid SUVs and Google Koala test cars were driven for 4,24,331 miles (682895 kms).