The United States Department of Transportation has issued guidelines about self-driving vehicles.
The tone seems to be largely positive:
For DOT, the excitement around highly automated vehicles (HAVs) starts with safety. Two numbers exemplify the need. First, 35,092 people died on U.S. roadways in 2015 alone. Second, 94 percent of crashes can be tied to a human choice or error.2 An important promise of HAVs is to address and mitigate that overwhelming majority of crashes.
A goal that DOT highlights is to prevent a patchwork of regulations across state lines. Of course, one person’s “patchwork of regulations” is another person’s “laboratories of democracy”.
The full report is over 100 pages and I confess I’ve only read the Executive Summary. But so far, so good.
David Silver 