Self-driving cars in the United States have officially entered a new era.
Author | Tetsu Ta
Edit | Wen Liang
Self-driving cars usher in an evolution.
Recently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a regulation that no longer requires self-driving car manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving control systems to meet collision standards.
"For vehicles designed to operate only by ADS, manual driving control is logically unnecessary," the agency said. ”
As a result, self-driving cars in the United States have officially entered a new era.
Bill Details
In NHTSA's view, the standard autonomous driving system of future cars is a foregone conclusion.
The NHTSA document says that in the future, cars will be equipped with autonomous driving systems without the need for traditional manual driving controls. While current occupant protection standards are set for vehicles of traditional design, many of the regulations no longer make sense for vehicle designs that do not have steering wheels or other driver controls.
As a result, the new regulations reinterpret existing terminology, update the standard for ADS systems, and in the process eliminate ambiguity for ADS vehicles.
The significance of the NHTSA's amendments is mainly to provide targeted safety protection standards for passengers riding in self-driving cars.
For example, the provision requires that children should not occupy the traditionally so-called "driver" position, as the design of the position does not protect the child in a collision.
In addition, the regulations have redefined or modified 12 original regulations, including driver-designated seat positions, manually operated driving controls, passenger seat positions, and outboard designated seat positions.
However, the EPA also imposes requirements on the control of self-driving cars, specifically:
When there is a driver's seat in the vehicle, the vehicle can use manual driving control, but manual control is not necessarily required when the ADS is running;
Airbags in the driver's seat should be applied to children;
The vehicle is in a state that does not require a driver to operate, and the ADS performs the driving task.
NHTSA said existing regulations currently allow manufacturers to deploy self-driving cars, and manufacturers may still need to apply to NHTSA to allow the sale of ADS-equipped vehicles as long as they have manual driving control capabilities and can be adjusted to changes in safety standards.
Steven Cliff, deputy director of NHTSA, said: "As drivers in ADS-equipped vehicles go from human to machine, the need to ensure human safety remains the same and must be integrated from the start. ”
The rule will take effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Chronicle, the official daily newspaper of the U.S. federal government.
Many parties pushed for the signing of new regulations
The amendment to this provision is not a unilateral act of NHTSA, but has been promoted by many parties.
According to the documents, the applicants for the amendment of the original regulations include automobile and equipment manufacturers, ADS developers, industry associations, consumer activists, disability activists, insurance organizations, universities, independent oil activist groups, and members of the general public, most of whom support the implementation of the new regulations.
In fact, the regulation was first proposed in March 2020 and was finally signed by NHTSA Deputy Director Steven Cliff, perhaps mainly due to years of lobbying by U.S. OEMs and autonomous driving companies.
In 2016, Wayo, Lyft, Ford, Uber, and Volvo teamed up in Washington, D.C., to form a lobby group, the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association (AVIA), hoping to lobby lawmakers through groups to pass legislation favorable to self-driving cars.
The association had called for it
All stakeholders make a clear distinction between autonomous vehicles and driver assistance systems to improve consumer trust and understanding;
Advocate that self-driving cars can perform the entire driving task;
Self-driving cars do not require manual operation, or even as a backup driver;
The people or packages on the bus are just passengers or cargo, etc.
And last month, GM and its self-driving technology arm, Cruise, filed an application with NHTSA to build and deploy self-driving cars that don't require manual controls, such as steering wheels or brake pedals.
Now that the new regulations have been issued, it is inseparable from the efforts of American OEMs and autonomous driving companies for 6 years or even longer.
China's autonomous driving development is accelerating
While the United States has allowed the sale of autonomous vehicles without manual control, China has also actively developed similar cars and promoted the formulation of laws and policies related to autonomous driving.
In terms of products, Baidu Apollo released the self-driving concept car "Auto Robot" in August last year.
It is reported that the car robot does not have a steering wheel, pedals, can talk to people, obey people's instructions and take the initiative to provide services. Based on Baidu's brain's AI capabilities, it also has the ability to learn itself and constantly upgrade.
It is worth mentioning that the car robot has L5 level automatic driving capabilities and does not require human driving at all. If humans try to control car robots, they can achieve it through voice, text, vision, 5G cloud driving and so on.
In terms of laws and policies, the mainland government has accelerated the formulation of policies such as autonomous driving road tests and manned demonstration licenses since 2018.
According to the data, from March 2018 to November 2021, the mainland government has issued a total of ten policies around automatic driving. Among them, in November 2021, some regions allowed the commercialization of autonomous driving, becoming a milestone in the history of mainland autonomous driving development.
Although mainland autonomous driving technology has led most countries in the world, it still faces many problems, which may be an important reason why the Chinese and American governments are driving different rhythms in autonomous driving laws and policies.
Compared with the United States, China's urban roads are more complex. For example, congested and narrow roads, pedestrians crossing the road, and a variety of special-shaped cars are all challenges that cannot be ignored for self-driving cars.
In addition, some data show that due to the mixed distribution of urban core areas, living areas, commercial areas and residential areas, the density of urban road traffic participants in Beijing is 15 times that of California, usa, and congestion during peak periods is a normal phenomenon, and it is more difficult for autonomous driving to achieve automatic driving in China and large-scale unmanned deployment.
Therefore, the mainland currently requires cars equipped with autonomous driving systems to have manually controllable devices or software.
Perhaps with the construction of intelligent transportation, smart cities and other projects, the mainland traffic situation has been improved, and the automatic driving technology has been further improved, the mainland will introduce similar regulations in the near future to clear the way for the development of the domestic autonomous driving industry.
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