Ideally the fees would be similar to the Norway model, where some tickets are tied to the income of the driver, in this case the pre-tax earnings of the company that created the driverless car.
As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies.
UPDATE (can't respond to the two subcomments below due to post throttling, so I'm updating this comment instead)
> the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes
@skybrian - Agreed! but if you read the article, the CA DMV is ticketing the manufacturer, not the operator.
None of my concerns hold if the operator was ticketed - infact, existing regulations are set up exactly that way, so no new regulation was even necessary. Something's not adding up.
> Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does
@ourspacetabs - Sure but the regulation seems to be specifically addressed at the manufacturer, not the operator.
I would have no concern if the regulation was addressed to the operator. The article atleast doesn't imply that's the case.
---
> The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a "notice of AV noncompliance" directly to the car's manufacturer.
> Under the new rules, police can cite AV companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds, and will issue penalties if their vehicles enter active emergency zones.
These are new frontiers in automotive regulation. Typically, if a car failed because of a manufacturer issue, the driver would be ticketed. For example: if Hyundai sold vehicles where the engine would explode around 50k miles and that caused an accident, the driver of the vehicle would be ticketed for it.
Now if we take the human out of it, it is Hyundai that would be ticketed for it. Insurance companies are certainly going to take notice and adjust their risk models accordingly.
I imagine there will be a lot of fingerpointing by the manufacturer towards customers.
In the worst case, this is the end of customers servicing their own autonomous vehicles.
If we imagine that most vehicles in the next 15 years will be autonomous, this would mean customers would have to handle regulation aimed at multibillion dollar companies, if they were to service their own autonomous vehicles, or give up on servicing their own autonomous vehicles entirely and just rent them instead.
I am, in general, hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future.
The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.
The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
We subsidize driving by somewhat over a trillion dollars annually, mostly due to lax penalties for negligence which shift liability to drivers’ victims[1]. One way to tackle all of these problems would be requiring drivers to cover the full damages.
Another simple and effective measure would be changing fines from absolute values to a percentage of income. Right now, parking in a bike lane usually doesn’t kill anyone so drivers are only thinking there’s a small chance of a small fine, but if it was a chance of, say, 0.1% of annual income Waymo technology would magically be capable of not doing that. Add a right of private action and enforcement would be high enough to really speed things along, too, and that’d improve safety and travel times for all road users.
Many things already reduce road deaths and they are infinitely easier to do that driverless cars, namely: viable alternatives to driving! Trains, streetcars, bike lanes, whatever.
Societies can already reduce road deaths to nearly zero, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's just redirecting all of the cash we spend on vehicles/cars/highways/roadways/signs/etc into public infrastructure that is all encompassing.
A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.
The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.
People are killed by industrial equipment fairly regularly.
I'd say we actually have a perfectly functional legal framework for all of this, and the real issue is a lot of new people are about to find out it also applies to them as well.
Whether it was working well in the first place is the real question.
If we consider fairness/retribution/justice then we won't get this future of less road deaths.
1. There will always be a probability of death from a vehicle. This can never go to 0%.
2. If the probability of a AV causing death is many magnitudes lower than human driving then that is the future we must choose.
If 1 and 2 holds and we hold AV manufactures accountable in the sense that Executives go to jail or are personal liable financially for deaths/injuries then AV will never get released or become mainstream even if this results in less total deaths. The sense of fairness/justice/retribution may make us feel better but result in more overall deaths. Logically this means that there must be a standard. Something like x deaths per y cars manufactured. If above the threshold you get big fines as a company. As technology gets better you can lower the threshold. Anything apart from causing deaths either purposefully or negligently would have be ignored.
Can we as a species accept this? That is another question.
> We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.
There is essentially nothing to be gained from doing this because it will not in either case be manufacturer; it will be an insurance company.
If the liability is paid by the vehicle owner's insurance then things work as they do now. You buy a car, insure it, if there is a liability there is an insurance claim and then the victim has someone to pay them for their injuries. Meanwhile the manufacturers still have a financial incentive to make safer cars because buyers want neither accident prone vehicles as the one they use nor high insurance rates. The insurance rates in particular are in direct competition with the car payment for the customer's available income.
Whereas if you try to put the liability on the manufacturer, several stupider things happen.
First, they're just going to buy insurance anyway, but now the insurance cost has to be front-loaded into the purchase price, which increases costs because now you're paying car loan interest on money to cover insurance five and ten years from now, when you otherwise wouldn't have needed to pay the premiums until the time comes.
Second, what happens to cars from manufacturers who no longer exist? They can't continue paying for insurance if they're bankrupt, so you need it to be someone else. Worse, if a company produces a vehicle which is unsafe, that will tend to cause them to go bankrupt. But then people still have them, and would continue to operate them if they're allowed to point victims at the bankrupt manufacturer, whereas the incentive you want is for the premiums on those cars to go up for the vehicle owners so that they stop operating them.
Simple. Blame the owner of the vehicle. They relied on automation and it failed. They go to jail for negligent homicide (whatever flavor is appropriate). That will tank sales of any AV tech that cannot maintain standards.
These people want to play god with our lives but at the same time move fast and break things. Look at software quality anywhere, it's a mess and only about to get much worse.
We should not let them. Jail time for anyone involved in any of the decision making process, applied at scale with the number of vehicles and deaths.
Why should the standards be any different? They want to change the status quo with tech only so they can get paid and extort us with yet more subscriptions.
AVs will never substantially reduce road deaths. They will optimize to just being slightly better than human, but fail in new and more unexpected ways. There is not enough incentive for them to make it safer.
I also hope AV will reduce road deaths in the future but I don't think what will make the difference is regulatory. Rather the tech will advance from doesn't work to works in Waymos but is expensive to works in most cars and has become cheap.
Ticketing is a weird thing to do with driverless cars.
If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow rules or else cease operations entirely.
If the violations are unintentional but happen only rarely in weird edge-case situations, then just set low frequency thresholds for them to be allowed, the same way we allow tiny amounts of rodent hairs in peanut butter. If AV companies exceed the threshold, then they get fined at first and eventually lose their permit -- but these aren't tickets for individual violations, but rather a yearly fine for going above the yearly threshold.
If the violations are intentional but not easily fixable -- e.g. they're stopping where not allowed because there's no legal place to stop within 15 blocks -- then the laws/regulations are bad, and tickets are essentially an unfair tax. That's the case in my city where moving trucks are essentially illegal, because it's illegal to double-park them, but there's usually no legal parking available within any reasonable distance that movers could carry furniture. So you just know that the cost of moving includes a "tax" of a parking ticket, unfair as it is.
Finally, if the violations are unintentional but happen all the time, the AV company should lose its permit because its software sucks.
I don't see how ticketing AVs for individual violations makes any sense.
EDIT: for those who think I'm letting AV companies get off too easily, it's precisely the opposite. I'm saying that if AV companies are violating traffic rules all the time and can't fix it, they should be banned. Ticketing is not the answer, because ticketing isn't holding these vehicles to a high enough standard. It's letting the companies get off the hook by merely paying occasional tickets instead of improving their software.
maybe Tesla can put that weird robot that connects the charging connector to the car to use by building a robot that can give the police a hand to place the ticket into
I don’t disagree with needing some sort of consequence for bad driverless actions. But I distrust the motivation. Maybe California is just looking for more revenue sources after rampantly mismanaging their state and letting corruption and fraud continue.
Are they trying to drive safety or revenue? The second order effect people forget about is tickets are a source of revenue for cities and police depts. Surely driverless car companies will absorb a few tickets and fix the issue quickly.
So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.
Given the lack of enforcement it must not be true that it’s a source of revenue for the city. I see ticketable violations multiple times a day and zero enforcement
What's gonna really be funny is the first time a state legislates that an AV company has to keep a bug in their software to maintain a municipal income flow.
Bike Lanes have turned out to be an interesting edge case.
Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social understandings" of laws.
- A waymo I rode in on a highway was happy to go slightly above the speed limit
- It seems at stop signs waymo prefers to be slightly aggressive to make it through rather than follow the letter of the law.
It seems silly that we have to teach robots to break certain laws sometimes but parking in bike lanes / yielding to pedestrians are laws that human drivers break all the time and I hope the mechanisms mentioned in the article prevent us from teaching robots to program anti-social but common behavior.
I read an article a while back that they made Waymo more aggressive, in the ways you mention, because they were quite annoying to other drivers when following the letter of the law. There is something to be said for following the flow of traffic.
I would imagine they would be able to revert back to more strict rule following once autonomous vehicles reach some level of critical mass and human drivers are needing to adapt to the AV traffic, rather than AVs needing to adapt to human traffic.
As a cyclist and driver I figure you have to use some common sense. I probably break some regulations all the time like stopping where you are not supposed to briefly but being safe and not inconveniencing others is the main thing.
Laws should be loser for autonomous vehicles with good safety records.
No one is protected by preventing waymos from making rolling stops, and driving like a human Uber driver.
Dunno what it's like in Cali but in the UK nearly all tickets are generated by automatic cameras and arrive in the post to the registered keeper of the vehicle.
If there aren't serious consequences for driverless cars committing crimes (I mean jail time for executives serious), what's to stop someone for starting a hitman business?
We'll just run someone over with our "driverless" car and pay a fine - capitalism, baby!
62 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 78.3 ms ] threadArchive link in case of random paywalling like I got: https://archive.ph/xHMDO
> the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes
@skybrian - Agreed! but if you read the article, the CA DMV is ticketing the manufacturer, not the operator.
None of my concerns hold if the operator was ticketed - infact, existing regulations are set up exactly that way, so no new regulation was even necessary. Something's not adding up.
> Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does
@ourspacetabs - Sure but the regulation seems to be specifically addressed at the manufacturer, not the operator.
I would have no concern if the regulation was addressed to the operator. The article atleast doesn't imply that's the case.
---
> The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a "notice of AV noncompliance" directly to the car's manufacturer.
> Under the new rules, police can cite AV companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds, and will issue penalties if their vehicles enter active emergency zones.
These are new frontiers in automotive regulation. Typically, if a car failed because of a manufacturer issue, the driver would be ticketed. For example: if Hyundai sold vehicles where the engine would explode around 50k miles and that caused an accident, the driver of the vehicle would be ticketed for it.
Now if we take the human out of it, it is Hyundai that would be ticketed for it. Insurance companies are certainly going to take notice and adjust their risk models accordingly.
I imagine there will be a lot of fingerpointing by the manufacturer towards customers.
In the worst case, this is the end of customers servicing their own autonomous vehicles.
If we imagine that most vehicles in the next 15 years will be autonomous, this would mean customers would have to handle regulation aimed at multibillion dollar companies, if they were to service their own autonomous vehicles, or give up on servicing their own autonomous vehicles entirely and just rent them instead.
The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.
The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
How’d you arrive at this conclusion? Why would fleet providers accept regrettable losses? Wouldn’t the last hurdle be technical?
> The question is how to achieve fairness
What does that have to do with automotive safety?
Another simple and effective measure would be changing fines from absolute values to a percentage of income. Right now, parking in a bike lane usually doesn’t kill anyone so drivers are only thinking there’s a small chance of a small fine, but if it was a chance of, say, 0.1% of annual income Waymo technology would magically be capable of not doing that. Add a right of private action and enforcement would be high enough to really speed things along, too, and that’d improve safety and travel times for all road users.
1. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...
The trickiest part will be figuring out how many dollars per mile driven is an acceptable cost of business..
I'd probably reserve the whole executives to jail thing to cases where you can prove negligence or something.
My understanding is that that is already the legal situation?
A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.
The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS#
The law applied to humans needs to account for their fallibilities. Not so with a machine.
I'd say we actually have a perfectly functional legal framework for all of this, and the real issue is a lot of new people are about to find out it also applies to them as well.
Whether it was working well in the first place is the real question.
If AVs will save lives, we need to be sure we aren't punitive to the point of making them disappear.
1. There will always be a probability of death from a vehicle. This can never go to 0%.
2. If the probability of a AV causing death is many magnitudes lower than human driving then that is the future we must choose.
If 1 and 2 holds and we hold AV manufactures accountable in the sense that Executives go to jail or are personal liable financially for deaths/injuries then AV will never get released or become mainstream even if this results in less total deaths. The sense of fairness/justice/retribution may make us feel better but result in more overall deaths. Logically this means that there must be a standard. Something like x deaths per y cars manufactured. If above the threshold you get big fines as a company. As technology gets better you can lower the threshold. Anything apart from causing deaths either purposefully or negligently would have be ignored.
Can we as a species accept this? That is another question.
There is essentially nothing to be gained from doing this because it will not in either case be manufacturer; it will be an insurance company.
If the liability is paid by the vehicle owner's insurance then things work as they do now. You buy a car, insure it, if there is a liability there is an insurance claim and then the victim has someone to pay them for their injuries. Meanwhile the manufacturers still have a financial incentive to make safer cars because buyers want neither accident prone vehicles as the one they use nor high insurance rates. The insurance rates in particular are in direct competition with the car payment for the customer's available income.
Whereas if you try to put the liability on the manufacturer, several stupider things happen.
First, they're just going to buy insurance anyway, but now the insurance cost has to be front-loaded into the purchase price, which increases costs because now you're paying car loan interest on money to cover insurance five and ten years from now, when you otherwise wouldn't have needed to pay the premiums until the time comes.
Second, what happens to cars from manufacturers who no longer exist? They can't continue paying for insurance if they're bankrupt, so you need it to be someone else. Worse, if a company produces a vehicle which is unsafe, that will tend to cause them to go bankrupt. But then people still have them, and would continue to operate them if they're allowed to point victims at the bankrupt manufacturer, whereas the incentive you want is for the premiums on those cars to go up for the vehicle owners so that they stop operating them.
These people want to play god with our lives but at the same time move fast and break things. Look at software quality anywhere, it's a mess and only about to get much worse.
We should not let them. Jail time for anyone involved in any of the decision making process, applied at scale with the number of vehicles and deaths.
Why should the standards be any different? They want to change the status quo with tech only so they can get paid and extort us with yet more subscriptions.
AVs will never substantially reduce road deaths. They will optimize to just being slightly better than human, but fail in new and more unexpected ways. There is not enough incentive for them to make it safer.
I hate this part, I don't think it is good for society. I think UPS gets lots and lots of parking tickets, and pays them as COB.
Maybe they should have "fix it" tickets, like they get for a burned-out headlight. Except they need a bug to be opened and fixed.
If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow rules or else cease operations entirely.
If the violations are unintentional but happen only rarely in weird edge-case situations, then just set low frequency thresholds for them to be allowed, the same way we allow tiny amounts of rodent hairs in peanut butter. If AV companies exceed the threshold, then they get fined at first and eventually lose their permit -- but these aren't tickets for individual violations, but rather a yearly fine for going above the yearly threshold.
If the violations are intentional but not easily fixable -- e.g. they're stopping where not allowed because there's no legal place to stop within 15 blocks -- then the laws/regulations are bad, and tickets are essentially an unfair tax. That's the case in my city where moving trucks are essentially illegal, because it's illegal to double-park them, but there's usually no legal parking available within any reasonable distance that movers could carry furniture. So you just know that the cost of moving includes a "tax" of a parking ticket, unfair as it is.
Finally, if the violations are unintentional but happen all the time, the AV company should lose its permit because its software sucks.
I don't see how ticketing AVs for individual violations makes any sense.
EDIT: for those who think I'm letting AV companies get off too easily, it's precisely the opposite. I'm saying that if AV companies are violating traffic rules all the time and can't fix it, they should be banned. Ticketing is not the answer, because ticketing isn't holding these vehicles to a high enough standard. It's letting the companies get off the hook by merely paying occasional tickets instead of improving their software.
So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.
Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social understandings" of laws. - A waymo I rode in on a highway was happy to go slightly above the speed limit - It seems at stop signs waymo prefers to be slightly aggressive to make it through rather than follow the letter of the law.
It seems silly that we have to teach robots to break certain laws sometimes but parking in bike lanes / yielding to pedestrians are laws that human drivers break all the time and I hope the mechanisms mentioned in the article prevent us from teaching robots to program anti-social but common behavior.
https://futurism.com/future-society/waymo-bike-lanes-traffic
I would imagine they would be able to revert back to more strict rule following once autonomous vehicles reach some level of critical mass and human drivers are needing to adapt to the AV traffic, rather than AVs needing to adapt to human traffic.
We'll just run someone over with our "driverless" car and pay a fine - capitalism, baby!