7 ms·

California Proposes Rules For Autonomous Cars

84 points by phreeza 15y ago

duaneb 15y ago
Excellent. The sooner we get the laws into place, the sooner autonomous cars become a reality. Does anyone know if California's laws are modeled after Nevada's?
- kroo 15y ago
  Looking at http://www.leg.state.nv.us/register/2011Register/R084-11I.pdf http://www.leg.state.nv.us/register/2011Register/R084-11I.pd..., it looks like Nevada decided to define a class of license (G) for operation of autonomous vehicles. The CA legislation just makes operating an autonomous car legal if it meets certain safety and performance criteria, which it doesn't define (instead, asks the CHP to come up with these rules). The way this bill is drafted, it looks to me like CA would be much less restrictive of autonomous car operation than Nevada.
VengefulCynic 15y ago
I would really love this if it creates a minimally-invasive legal framework to enable innovation and curb nonsense like pedestrians jumping in front of cars and trying to sue the manufacturer when they get hit (hopefully while providing a mechanism where manufacturers can indemnify their vehicles without too much liability danger in such cases). On the other hand, I have to say that I don't exactly have the greatest level of faith in the California Assembly based on past performance. Here's hoping they buck the trend and establish a framework to encourage rather than inhibit innovation.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Have cameras on the car. Have them record into a 120 second buffer. When the car detects a crash write the buffer to disk with a timestamp.
  - robk 15y ago
    Ugh, as a driver I'd prefer not to have all my actions recorded regardless of whether it's beneficial to me. This reeks of invasion of my privacy and possibly opens me up to prosecution if the camera were subpoenaed in a criminal proceeding for something unrelated to the car's function. Same reason I don't leave a GPS trail everywhere by choice.
    - unimpressive 15y ago
      I don't think your going to be outed by a 120 second buffer. Especially if it isn't written to disk until theres a crash. (Heck, two minutes is probably a shorter time than it takes to open the hood and spray the RAM with liquid nitrogen.) Unless of course your being accused of a crime that was either caught on film two minutes ago or it involved a car crash. EDIT: Or was caught on film two minutes prior and involved a car cash.
    - DanBC 15y ago
      In the UK we have automatic number plate recognition and a nationwide network of CCTV. Some places can recognise a stolen car and dispatch police within 60 seconds. (Notably the City of Westminster and Heathrow airport.) > I'd prefer not to have all my actions recorded Fair enough, but it's too late for some countries.
      - burgerbrain 15y ago
        I mean no offence (I fully recognize that the UK is a sovereign state with rules that largely satisfy it's own culture and people), but I feel that if we universalize this idea ("Fair enough, but it's too late for some countries.") the result will be nothing more than a race to the bottom.
    - Game_Ender 15y ago
      It's highly likely that any autonomous car will have something very similar but with sensor data instead of video. If I were making said cars, I would not sell them without that feature. Otherwise, if something ever happened to the car I would have no decent record of what my software was trying to do in the incident. You would have no way of fixing serious issues, or absolving yourself of fault. This is the reasoning behind airline black boxes.
tatsuke95 15y ago
>"The vast majority of accidents are due to human error." Obviously, as there is very little alternative to human error right now. But there's no reason to believe that to be the case when you introduce autonomous vehicles. There's a whole new variable. Still, a required step for progress.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  very little alternative Manufacturing defects, eg faulty brakes.
  - protomyth 15y ago
    Having the car make driving decisions is a different realm than manufacturing defects. We have seen some software problems with various cars already, and as the software gets more complex, I would expect to see that magnified. Look at the aerospace industry for examples (e.g. F-22, Airbus).
    - quandrum 15y ago
      > We have seen some software problems with various cars already Have we? The highest profile one I know of turned out to not be be software at all (Referring to Toyota accelerator[1]), but rather a combination of floor mats and human error. [1] http://www.nhtsa.gov/PR/DOT-16-11 http://www.nhtsa.gov/PR/DOT-16-11
      - protomyth 15y ago
        The Civic Hybrid is one example (actually the base model Civic needed a firmware upgrade). Auto manufactures do not produce error free software, and there are a lot more cars than planes.
- kennystone 15y ago
  Manufacturing defects, bad roads, poor signage - Government has optimized these pretty well.
mwerty 15y ago
Are there companies working on this besides Google?
- k-mcgrady 15y ago
  Car companies. Google certainly wasn't the first to be working on self-driving cars, they just got a lot of time in the tech press for it. The big car companies have been working on it for years. I can't find any details but I remember hearing about some companies working on it about 8-10 years ago. More recently BMW have been working on it: http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072117_on-the-road-with-bmws-self-driving-car-video http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072117_on-the-road-with-...
  - Game_Ender 15y ago
    There is a difference in complexity though. Most systems developed by the Automotive companies are just a step above highway lane keeping, and adaptive cruse control. Google's system handles city roads with pedestrians and more complex traffic patterns. There is a cost to that of course, Google's system uses $100k of sensors, and isn't well integrated into the body of a car. This means it's father off from being seen a in a production car. I could see it being sold as an aftermarket add on to specific cars, maybe even only to business customers, who then want to sell the service and automated car can provide.
    - k-mcgrady 15y ago
      You're right there is a difference. Google has better software. The car companies have better cars. If Google does continue to push the technology I hope they license it. I dread to think what an actual Google car would be like. It's an interesting market that's been progressing for years. It seems now that we are very close to seeing it in production models.
- eichin 15y ago
  Just look at the participant list for the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge competitions; http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teamlist.asp http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teamlist.asp though you also need to look past some of the university affiliations to see the partner companies (VW for the Stanford team, for example.)
adriand 15y ago
Prediction: at some point, there will be an accident involving an autonomous car. The event data recorder (aka the "black box") will indicate that the human operator took control of the vehicle before the accident occurred. The driver/passenger, however, will claim this was not true, and a lawsuit will commence where there will be claims that the EDR was hacked or that the car manufacturer/software provider modified the EDR to falsely blame the human in the event of an accident.
- brnstz 15y ago
  More generally, how can we evaluate an autonomous car's effectiveness in avoiding an accident, if there is always a human sitting in the driver's seat? I think most drivers would instinctively take control of the car if they felt in danger, whether or not it's statistically in their interest.
- blake8086 15y ago
  Won't the driver perhaps claim the vehicle was going to crash and they attempted to stop it?
kroo 15y ago
Here's the proposed text, for anyone who's interested: http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_1251-1300/sb_1298_bill_20120223_introduced.pdf http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_1251-1300/sb_129... Edit: As I read it, this is pretty straight forward, doing the following things: - Makes it explicitly legal to operate an autonomous car on public roads, if your car has met a safety standard yet to be devised. - Authorizes the establishment of safety standards for autonomous vehicles by the California Highway Patrol. - Until these standards are devised, it does not prohibit autonomous cars from operating on CA public roads. "Autonomous Cars" in this case are defined fairly narrowly: a car capable of driving "without active control and continuous monitoring of a human operator".
noduerme 15y ago
Has anyone written or thought deeply about all the ways that self-driving cars could be tricked or hacked into causing accidents, kidnapping passengers, driving off cliffs, running people over, or otherwise creating havoc? Seems like it was just a couple years ago that Toyota was recalling cars over a "sudden acceleration" problem. A system like this is only going to be as good as the data coming to the car, and given the knowledge that all cars will react a certain way to a certain stimulus, it's a lot easier to design a low-tech hack that would kill a lot of people. Here's one that comes to mind: Given an two-lane road with a narrow shoulder and an embankment, place a small boulder on the right side of each lane. A human being will either swerve off the embankment or rip their transmission out on the rock. What's a bot going to do?
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  Or you could fill a truck up with diesel and fertilizer and blow it up. This technology is far more likely to reduce deaths associated with cars than increase. Go back to the beginning of the 20th century and think how much damage could be caused by creating a nationwide electric grid. People could electrocute people at will. Personally, I'm kind of glad we went ahead with it.
  - noduerme 15y ago
    [EDIT] Again, I really don't understand why I'd be downvoted for asking a legitimate question like this. It's rather disconcerting. While it's great to think about a future in which this technology is safe and widely available, it seems to me I'm being attacked for simply asking basic security questions that I would ask about any large system that was going through trials prior to mass rollout. And rather than hearing any specific answers, I'm just being attacked and voted down. I think anyone who's spent time in IT would probably ask these things first before they deployed a new system in their company office, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask them about about a potentially game-changing social innovation.[/EDIT] That's true. But blowing up a diesel truck is hard to do remotely, and requires someone to actively attack at a specific place and time. I'm not sure why I got downrated for my post; I'm just asking, doesn't this create a lot of security holes and attack vectors that need to be studied before allowing it? I mean, I haven't heard anything about security, at all. The focus seems to be on a safe driving experience, but where's the white paper on counter-hacking measures? Can you imagine if Google launched Gmail without any kind of plan to mitigate stolen passwords or hijacked accounts? As it is, there are plenty of people who do have their accounts hijacked. Luckily, that doesn't lead to collisions and deaths. Consider for a moment how many people run Windows and IE, with the latest security updates, who are still vulnerable to zero day exploits. Consider how many don't update their software and get swept up in botnets a few days later. Now imagine each and every compromised PC has physical control over 2-3 tons of rolling aluminum and steel, that can go anywhere on a public highway, with human beings inside it. An attacker who had taken control over a botnet of compromised autonomous carscould drive swarms of them wherever they wanted by remote control. Now, rather than downvote me, tell me what security protocols will be in place to prevent the scenarios I've outlined.
agumonkey 15y ago
Is there any article/video (I didn't investigate) showing multiple autonomous cars interacting ? I'd be curious to see if there's any behavioral resonance leading to epic havoc.
- state_machine 15y ago
  DARPA Urban Challenge (2007): http://www.google.com/search?tbm=vid&q=darpa+urban+challenge http://www.google.com/search?tbm=vid&q=darpa+urban+chall... Several teams competed, entering driverless cars which interacted with each other and some vehicles operated by real people on a closed course. Carnegie Mellon's Boss car completed all the DARPA conditions and won the grand prize.
  - agumonkey 15y ago
    Thanks a lot. I wish there was a higher density of cars. Also different teams => different systems.. that might introduce good jitter to avoid systemic locks. Anyhow it feels pretty safe.. can't wait to see it becomes standard.
    - Game_Ender 15y ago
      One issue that I haven't seen much talked about is the is system wide control instabilities if everything is automated, as you have alluded to. I also don't know if anyone is doing any work in preventing cross talk and interference when you have several dozen vehicle all with similar lasers and radars in close proximity. If you operate two of the popular Velodyne lasers near each other, used on the Google vehicles, you get a good amount of noise on both sensors.
drewblaisdell 15y ago
Does anyone know if Nevada or California have discussed operating an autonomous vehicle while intoxicated yet?
- sheraz 15y ago
  :-) The SEO kings are going to be waaaaayyy out in front on those terms now. Shall we start the domain rush?

84 points by phreeza 15y ago

Excellent. The sooner we get the laws into place, the sooner autonomous cars become a reality. Does anyone know if California's laws are modeled after Nevada's?

kroo 15y ago
Looking at http://www.leg.state.nv.us/register/2011Register/R084-11I.pdf http://www.leg.state.nv.us/register/2011Register/R084-11I.pd..., it looks like Nevada decided to define a class of license (G) for operation of autonomous vehicles. The CA legislation just makes operating an autonomous car legal if it meets certain safety and performance criteria, which it doesn't define (instead, asks the CHP to come up with these rules). The way this bill is drafted, it looks to me like CA would be much less restrictive of autonomous car operation than Nevada.

VengefulCynic 15y ago

I would really love this if it creates a minimally-invasive legal framework to enable innovation and curb nonsense like pedestrians jumping in front of cars and trying to sue the manufacturer when they get hit (hopefully while providing a mechanism where manufacturers can indemnify their vehicles without too much liability danger in such cases). On the other hand, I have to say that I don't exactly have the greatest level of faith in the California Assembly based on past performance. Here's hoping they buck the trend and establish a framework to encourage rather than inhibit innovation.

DanBC 15y ago
Have cameras on the car. Have them record into a 120 second buffer. When the car detects a crash write the buffer to disk with a timestamp.
- robk 15y ago
  Ugh, as a driver I'd prefer not to have all my actions recorded regardless of whether it's beneficial to me. This reeks of invasion of my privacy and possibly opens me up to prosecution if the camera were subpoenaed in a criminal proceeding for something unrelated to the car's function. Same reason I don't leave a GPS trail everywhere by choice.
  - unimpressive 15y ago
    I don't think your going to be outed by a 120 second buffer. Especially if it isn't written to disk until theres a crash. (Heck, two minutes is probably a shorter time than it takes to open the hood and spray the RAM with liquid nitrogen.) Unless of course your being accused of a crime that was either caught on film two minutes ago or it involved a car crash. EDIT: Or was caught on film two minutes prior and involved a car cash.
  - DanBC 15y ago
    In the UK we have automatic number plate recognition and a nationwide network of CCTV. Some places can recognise a stolen car and dispatch police within 60 seconds. (Notably the City of Westminster and Heathrow airport.) > I'd prefer not to have all my actions recorded Fair enough, but it's too late for some countries.
    - burgerbrain 15y ago
      I mean no offence (I fully recognize that the UK is a sovereign state with rules that largely satisfy it's own culture and people), but I feel that if we universalize this idea ("Fair enough, but it's too late for some countries.") the result will be nothing more than a race to the bottom.
  - Game_Ender 15y ago
    It's highly likely that any autonomous car will have something very similar but with sensor data instead of video. If I were making said cars, I would not sell them without that feature. Otherwise, if something ever happened to the car I would have no decent record of what my software was trying to do in the incident. You would have no way of fixing serious issues, or absolving yourself of fault. This is the reasoning behind airline black boxes.

tatsuke95 15y ago

>"The vast majority of accidents are due to human error." Obviously, as there is very little alternative to human error right now. But there's no reason to believe that to be the case when you introduce autonomous vehicles. There's a whole new variable. Still, a required step for progress.

anigbrowl 15y ago
very little alternative Manufacturing defects, eg faulty brakes.
- protomyth 15y ago
  Having the car make driving decisions is a different realm than manufacturing defects. We have seen some software problems with various cars already, and as the software gets more complex, I would expect to see that magnified. Look at the aerospace industry for examples (e.g. F-22, Airbus).
  - quandrum 15y ago
    > We have seen some software problems with various cars already Have we? The highest profile one I know of turned out to not be be software at all (Referring to Toyota accelerator[1]), but rather a combination of floor mats and human error. [1] http://www.nhtsa.gov/PR/DOT-16-11 http://www.nhtsa.gov/PR/DOT-16-11
    - protomyth 15y ago
      The Civic Hybrid is one example (actually the base model Civic needed a firmware upgrade). Auto manufactures do not produce error free software, and there are a lot more cars than planes.
kennystone 15y ago
Manufacturing defects, bad roads, poor signage - Government has optimized these pretty well.

mwerty 15y ago

Are there companies working on this besides Google?

k-mcgrady 15y ago
Car companies. Google certainly wasn't the first to be working on self-driving cars, they just got a lot of time in the tech press for it. The big car companies have been working on it for years. I can't find any details but I remember hearing about some companies working on it about 8-10 years ago. More recently BMW have been working on it: http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072117_on-the-road-with-bmws-self-driving-car-video http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1072117_on-the-road-with-...
- Game_Ender 15y ago
  There is a difference in complexity though. Most systems developed by the Automotive companies are just a step above highway lane keeping, and adaptive cruse control. Google's system handles city roads with pedestrians and more complex traffic patterns. There is a cost to that of course, Google's system uses $100k of sensors, and isn't well integrated into the body of a car. This means it's father off from being seen a in a production car. I could see it being sold as an aftermarket add on to specific cars, maybe even only to business customers, who then want to sell the service and automated car can provide.
  - k-mcgrady 15y ago
    You're right there is a difference. Google has better software. The car companies have better cars. If Google does continue to push the technology I hope they license it. I dread to think what an actual Google car would be like. It's an interesting market that's been progressing for years. It seems now that we are very close to seeing it in production models.
eichin 15y ago
Just look at the participant list for the DARPA Grand Challenge and Urban Challenge competitions; http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teamlist.asp http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/teamlist.asp though you also need to look past some of the university affiliations to see the partner companies (VW for the Stanford team, for example.)

adriand 15y ago

Prediction: at some point, there will be an accident involving an autonomous car. The event data recorder (aka the "black box") will indicate that the human operator took control of the vehicle before the accident occurred. The driver/passenger, however, will claim this was not true, and a lawsuit will commence where there will be claims that the EDR was hacked or that the car manufacturer/software provider modified the EDR to falsely blame the human in the event of an accident.

brnstz 15y ago
More generally, how can we evaluate an autonomous car's effectiveness in avoiding an accident, if there is always a human sitting in the driver's seat? I think most drivers would instinctively take control of the car if they felt in danger, whether or not it's statistically in their interest.
blake8086 15y ago
Won't the driver perhaps claim the vehicle was going to crash and they attempted to stop it?

kroo 15y ago

Here's the proposed text, for anyone who's interested: http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_1251-1300/sb_1298_bill_20120223_introduced.pdf http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_1251-1300/sb_129... Edit: As I read it, this is pretty straight forward, doing the following things: - Makes it explicitly legal to operate an autonomous car on public roads, if your car has met a safety standard yet to be devised. - Authorizes the establishment of safety standards for autonomous vehicles by the California Highway Patrol. - Until these standards are devised, it does not prohibit autonomous cars from operating on CA public roads. "Autonomous Cars" in this case are defined fairly narrowly: a car capable of driving "without active control and continuous monitoring of a human operator".

noduerme 15y ago

Has anyone written or thought deeply about all the ways that self-driving cars could be tricked or hacked into causing accidents, kidnapping passengers, driving off cliffs, running people over, or otherwise creating havoc? Seems like it was just a couple years ago that Toyota was recalling cars over a "sudden acceleration" problem. A system like this is only going to be as good as the data coming to the car, and given the knowledge that all cars will react a certain way to a certain stimulus, it's a lot easier to design a low-tech hack that would kill a lot of people. Here's one that comes to mind: Given an two-lane road with a narrow shoulder and an embankment, place a small boulder on the right side of each lane. A human being will either swerve off the embankment or rip their transmission out on the rock. What's a bot going to do?

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
Or you could fill a truck up with diesel and fertilizer and blow it up. This technology is far more likely to reduce deaths associated with cars than increase. Go back to the beginning of the 20th century and think how much damage could be caused by creating a nationwide electric grid. People could electrocute people at will. Personally, I'm kind of glad we went ahead with it.
- noduerme 15y ago
  [EDIT] Again, I really don't understand why I'd be downvoted for asking a legitimate question like this. It's rather disconcerting. While it's great to think about a future in which this technology is safe and widely available, it seems to me I'm being attacked for simply asking basic security questions that I would ask about any large system that was going through trials prior to mass rollout. And rather than hearing any specific answers, I'm just being attacked and voted down. I think anyone who's spent time in IT would probably ask these things first before they deployed a new system in their company office, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask them about about a potentially game-changing social innovation.[/EDIT] That's true. But blowing up a diesel truck is hard to do remotely, and requires someone to actively attack at a specific place and time. I'm not sure why I got downrated for my post; I'm just asking, doesn't this create a lot of security holes and attack vectors that need to be studied before allowing it? I mean, I haven't heard anything about security, at all. The focus seems to be on a safe driving experience, but where's the white paper on counter-hacking measures? Can you imagine if Google launched Gmail without any kind of plan to mitigate stolen passwords or hijacked accounts? As it is, there are plenty of people who do have their accounts hijacked. Luckily, that doesn't lead to collisions and deaths. Consider for a moment how many people run Windows and IE, with the latest security updates, who are still vulnerable to zero day exploits. Consider how many don't update their software and get swept up in botnets a few days later. Now imagine each and every compromised PC has physical control over 2-3 tons of rolling aluminum and steel, that can go anywhere on a public highway, with human beings inside it. An attacker who had taken control over a botnet of compromised autonomous carscould drive swarms of them wherever they wanted by remote control. Now, rather than downvote me, tell me what security protocols will be in place to prevent the scenarios I've outlined.

agumonkey 15y ago

Is there any article/video (I didn't investigate) showing multiple autonomous cars interacting ? I'd be curious to see if there's any behavioral resonance leading to epic havoc.

state_machine 15y ago
DARPA Urban Challenge (2007): http://www.google.com/search?tbm=vid&q=darpa+urban+challenge http://www.google.com/search?tbm=vid&q=darpa+urban+chall... Several teams competed, entering driverless cars which interacted with each other and some vehicles operated by real people on a closed course. Carnegie Mellon's Boss car completed all the DARPA conditions and won the grand prize.
- agumonkey 15y ago
  Thanks a lot. I wish there was a higher density of cars. Also different teams => different systems.. that might introduce good jitter to avoid systemic locks. Anyhow it feels pretty safe.. can't wait to see it becomes standard.
  - Game_Ender 15y ago
    One issue that I haven't seen much talked about is the is system wide control instabilities if everything is automated, as you have alluded to. I also don't know if anyone is doing any work in preventing cross talk and interference when you have several dozen vehicle all with similar lasers and radars in close proximity. If you operate two of the popular Velodyne lasers near each other, used on the Google vehicles, you get a good amount of noise on both sensors.

drewblaisdell 15y ago

Does anyone know if Nevada or California have discussed operating an autonomous vehicle while intoxicated yet?

sheraz 15y ago
:-) The SEO kings are going to be waaaaayyy out in front on those terms now. Shall we start the domain rush?