DOT’s Foxx: Self-driving cars are coming, so government should be ready
Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx. AUVSI photo.
Self-driving cars and trucks are on the way, Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx said at the first day of AUVSI’s Automated Vehicles Symposium, and regulators have a good chance to help them take to the roads safely.
“Automated vehicles are coming. Ready or not, they are coming, and the choice we have in government is to either act or react,” Foxx said. “And our view is that we must act, that we must prepare our ecosystem to integrate these new types of vehicles into the bloodstream of American infrastructure.”
Unmanned aircraft were already in the air to some extent before rules governing them were written, he said, but “we have a chance to actually get ahead of that with automated cars.”
Foxx said studies have indicated that up to 94 percent of crashes today can be attributed to human error.
“Automated cars could eliminate a significant proportion of those crashes,” he said. “That potential is enormous … I do want to make it clear, though, that autonomous doesn’t mean perfect. If we can achieve … 80 percent reductions in crashes, that would be hugely significant to us. That means saved lives.”
The Department of Transportation is trying to help by various means, including by the Smart City Challenge, which aims to create the first U.S. city to integrate a variety of technology, including self-driving cars, connected vehicles and smart sensors. Columbus, Ohio, was recently named the winner of that challenge, which includes up to $40 million from Foxx’s agency.
Other ideas could include pre-market approval steps from the government, which would require greater cooperation between industry and government, and greater coordination between the federal government and the states so manufacturers don’t have to deal with 50 different standards.
Foxx said he’s excited by the challenge.
It’s an exciting time to be in the transportation world. It’s gone from being kind of a stodgy, kind of old school type of area to being cool again. But we shouldn’t get so blinded by it that we don’t remember that the fundamental premise … is we help people to get places. And that means we all have to be focused on safety,” Foxx said.
He was preceded by Brian Kelly, secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, who said California has been studying automated vehicles since the late 1980s.
“In 2014, the California Department of Motor Vehicles adopted regulations for the testing of automated vehicles, and now 14 companies are approved to test on California’s public streets,” he said.
That testing is “an important step in the eventual deployment of self-driving cars, but we must maintain our focus on safety first,” he said.
Kelly said in 2014, more than 32,000 Americans died in traffic accidents, with more than 3,000 of them in California.
“With autonomous vehicles we have the potential to bring us closer to achieving the vision … of zero deaths on our roadways,” he said.
The conference continues on Wednesday.
