Car stuff (public number: chedongxi)
Author | Mumi
Edited by | Xiaohan
Car companies can build cars without steering wheels!
According to foreign media Reuters, the U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recently issued the final version of the Occupant Protection Safety Standards for Vehicles Without Driving Controls, making it clear that fully autonomous vehicles no longer need to be equipped with traditional steering wheels. Manual controls such as brakes or accelerator pedals to meet occupant safety protection standards in a collision.
▲ Reuters official website reported
This means that car companies can legally and compliantly produce driverless vehicles without steering wheels and control pedals and put them into commercial use, without being hindered by old regulations – although vehicles without manual controls can be produced before, they cannot be sold or commercialized on a large scale because they cannot meet the requirements of collision regulations.
When the NHTSA officially issued this final rule, it directly used the description of the Historic Step, which shows that its importance to promoting the implementation of high-level autonomous driving or driverless vehicle applications is extremely high.
▲ The official website of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation announced new regulations
At present, China and the United States are actively carrying out autonomous driving technology competitions, while enterprises are actively conducting technical research, the two governments are also constantly introducing new policies and regulations to provide assistance for industrial development.
On the whole, the policy development speed of the United States is very fast, not only took the lead in allowing automatic driving to test on the road, allowing the removal of safety personnel, etc., and now has made breakthroughs in vehicle collision safety, occupant protection, etc. I believe that the mainland government will also follow up quickly in the next step to provide new impetus for industrial development.
First, clarify the unmanned vehicle occupant protection standards and update the regulations many times
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said: "An important task for the U.S. Department of Transportation over the next decade is to ensure that motor vehicle safety standards are in sync with the development of autonomous driving and driver assistance systems. ”
The new regulations are an important step in this plan – it also establishes strong safety standards for vehicles equipped with ADS (autonomous driving systems).
▲Part of the regulations
NHTSA Deputy Director Steven Cliff said in a public statement that in vehicles equipped with ADS, drivers are transformed from humans to machines, but the need to ensure human safety is still the same. And under the new rules, ADS automakers still need to put safety first.
Prior to the new rule, U.S. occupant protection standards were written for common, traditional vehicle features. But the new regulations have been updated accordingly , which have helped clarify what automakers need to do to meet occupant protection standards when producing vehicles without traditional manually controlled ADS.
In fact, this is not the first time that the U.S. authorities have updated their autonomous driving regulations.
NHTSA has been actively involved in monitoring and overseeing the safety testing and deployment of these autonomous vehicles. For example, NHTSA has been closely monitoring Tesla's FSD testing, and has repeatedly put forward regulatory requirements and even recalls on Tesla's Autopilot operation and FSD testing.
Last summer, NHTSA issued a regulation requiring vehicles equipped with ADS or certain advanced driver assistance systems to submit crash and accident reports. Such a report would help NHTSA investigators quickly identify possible flaws in these self-driving systems.
In addition, NHTSA began developing rules last year to set safety standards for emergency braking of autonomous vehicles, a driver-assist technology that can help avoid collisions with other road users, including pedestrians.
In addition, for the first time, NHTSA will consider incorporating Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) features such as automatic emergency braking, blind spot detection, and lane keeping assist into the government's vehicle safety rating standards.
This signals that the previous safety standards may have to be adjusted, as the previous safety standards only assessed the occupant protection of the vehicle through crash tests, but did not take into account the safety of the vehicle to pedestrians on the road while driving.
U.S. authority officials said, "The idea for NHTSA is to update the car's safety rating, and advanced driver assistance features will play a very important role in the safety rating." ”
Second, two years ago, the first proposed GM plan to produce steering wheelless vehicles
Automakers and tech companies are currently facing huge hurdles in deploying ADS-equipped vehicles because current motor vehicle safety standards are based on the premise that humans control vehicles.
After the new regulations were enacted, a spokesman for U.S. authorities said manually operated driving controls were logically unnecessary for vehicles operating only with ADS.
NHTSA officials attend a meeting
It is reported that the new rule was first proposed in March 2020 and finally passed after two years. Under the new rules, the old rules of "a vehicle must be equipped with a driver's seat, a steering wheel, or only one passenger seat in the front row" are no longer required.
Last month, General Motors and its self-driving technology arm Cruise also filed an application with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to allow the production of self-driving cars without human controls such as steering wheels or brake pedals. Perhaps soon, GM's steering-wheelless autonomous vehicles will soon be available.
Conclusion: The autonomous driving industry will continue to mature
As an emerging thing in the automotive industry, regulations in this field are not perfect at present, resulting in some standards in the autonomous driving industry are not uniform.
This time, the United States for the first time to distinguish between autonomous vehicles and traditional vehicles and the introduction of corresponding regulations, which also released a signal from the authorities - the automatic driving industry has been continuously developed, in this process of development and growth, it naturally needs more perfect and targeted laws and regulations to regulate.
At this year's two sessions, we also saw that many car company representatives also put forward proposals to improve the laws and regulations in the field of autonomous driving in the mainland, which shows that improving automatic driving legislation is the trend of the times.
As the autonomous driving industry continues to mature, a new future way of travel will also enter the homes of ordinary people faster.