‘Will Your Self-Driving Vehicle Need a License?’

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – In attempting to legislate the testing and ultimately the impending regular use of self-driving vehicles, a lot of government entities are weighing in, from Congress to individual states and even some cities.

It prompts attorney Jennifer Dukarski to ask whether the law can keep up with technology. “It usually doesn’t,” she says, answering her own question.

Dukarski is among participants at a session entitled “Will Your Self-Driving Vehicle Need a License?” at the Center for Automotive Research’s annual Management Briefing Seminars here.

In one way or another, 36 states have become involved in overseeing autonomous-vehicle testing, particularly on public roads.

There are federal agency guidelines on matters such as whether self-driving cars will still need steering wheels.

Congress is considering the so-called Autonomous Vehicle START Act, a pending initiative to centralize rules for testing and then deploying self-driving vehicles.

“Have any of these laws changed anything that is happening on the ground” as automakers and others perfect their prototypes? asks session moderator Eric Paul Dennis, a CAR analyst.

“Not really,” says panelist Brian Daugherty, chief technology officer for the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Assn. 

Dukarski calls the pending federal legislation “too slow. It’s not going to get you there.” A goal of the bill is to avoid a patchwork of state and local laws on self-driving cars.

Basically, the bill tells states and cities, “You don’t have to do this, we already have,” says fellow panelist Bryant Walker Smith.

“States and cities are creating regimes that are so restrictive,” says Dukarski of the Butzel Long law firm in Ann Arbor, MI. She also holds an engineering degree. “In my state, the little city of Canton is creating its own regulatory framework of how and when autonomous vehicles can operate in town.”

Overreaching government reaction to new technology is old news, says Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. He also is an engineer and heads a task force on on-road autonomous-vehicle standards.

He notes that the island of Nantucket, MA, banned automobiles in their early days. “It didn’t last because people wanted their vehicles.”

Daugherty (pictured below) says: “Regulators are struggling. You have a tug-and-pull situation. You have overreach by some people who are swimming outside their lanes.”

Session panelists also discuss the inevitability of automakers facing lawsuits if a self-driving car malfunctions, causing an accident. Some of those already have occurred in test situations. A pedestrian was killed in one such incident.

Moderator Dennis asks panelists, “What is reasonably safe?”

Smith says: “It’s safer than the one that’s just failed. That’s historic. In the early days of automobiles, when the original spokes broke, they made them thicker. When steering wheels snapped and speared drivers in accidents, that was fixed, too.  It’s something companies do.”

Dukarski touts the self-regulating effectiveness of industry oversight in autonomous-car development. “People say, ‘Isn’t that the fox watching the henhouse?’ Maybe it’s time to let the fox do that.”

Yet she notes work remains in preparing self-driving vehicles for the real world of transportation. She recalls a test-drive mishap in Detroit three years ago on a road that had both lane markers and tar lines. “The vehicle followed the tar lines and almost ran into another vehicle.”  

As automakers and other companies such as Google’s Waymo continue to develop their versions of self-driving cars, “these vehicles are constantly monitored and upgraded,” Smith says.

Dukarski, who had sparred with Smith on some issues during the session, responds, “I couldn’t agree more with that.”