NHTSA chief promises ‘nimble and flexible’ guidance on automated vehicles
NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosalind speaks at the Automated Vehicles Symposium.
The administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration promised on Wednesday that pending guidance on highly automated vehicles will be “nimble and flexible” and able to keep up with the pace of technological innovation.
Mark Rosekind was the keynote speaker at the second day of the Automated Vehicles Symposium, hosted by AUVSI and TRB.
That guidance is being “is being reviewed, tweaked and perfected as we speak,” he said. “It’s an important document, and so it’s important that we get it right.”
It won’t be a long one, though. Rosekind joked that “those expecting 16,000 pages of regulations will be disappointed, or, more likely, relieved.”
Rosekind laid out in stark terms why the guidance — and automated vehicles — are needed. The nation lost 35,200 people to automobile accidents last year, the equivalent of crashing a Boeing 747 every week.
“It’s not just a number. Those are mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, colleagues, friends, family,” Rosekind said. “That number is alarmingly higher than just a year before. That is a dangerous warning sign that we must use as a call to action for improved safety on our roadways.”
Echoing comments made the day before by Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, Rosekind said technology could help mitigate human errors or choices, which cause the overwhelming number of accidents on the roads.
“If there was a way to account for all those human choices or behaviors, we would be talking about a world where we could potentially prevent or mitigate 19 of every 20 crashes on the road,” he said. “That is the promise of automated vehicles, and that is, at its core, why NHTSA and the Department of Transportation have been so focused on doing what we can to accelerate the lifesaving promise of highly automated vehicles and connected vehicles.”
NHTSA is investigating the recent fatal crash of a Tesla automobile whose driver was employing the “Autopilot” mode, an advanced series of driver assist functions. Rosekind dubbed that the “elephant in the room” and said he couldn’t comment on an ongoing investigation.
However, he said, “I can tell you that no one incident will derail the Department of Transportation and NHTSA from its mission to improve safety on the roads by pursuing new lifesaving technologies.”
He said incidents will continue to occur with highly automated vehicles, and NHTSA will continue to investigate them and take such actions as are needed.
He also said that “new, highly automated vehicles provide an enormous opportunity for learning that has rarely existed before. When something goes wrong, or a highly automated vehicle encounters an edge case — something it hasn’t been programmed to deal with — that data can be taken, analyzed, and then the lessons can be shared with more than the rest of that vehicle fleet. It could be shared with all automated vehicles.
“Whereas new drivers must learn on the road and make the same mistakes as thousands before them, automated vehicles will be able to benefit from the data and learning of all others on the road,” Rosekind said.
European Efforts
Automated vehicles have racked up thousands of test miles on American roads, but have been on European roads even longer, as various countries there have conducted large-scale demonstrations and tests.
Speakers at the symposium gave updates on several such programs, some that are gearing up and some that are winding down.
One is CityMobil2, an effort that placed small self-driving buses on the roads of several cities in France, Spain, Greece, Switzerland and others.
Speaker Adriano Alessandrini, a professor at the University of Florence and director of the project, said after four years the demonstration is coming to an end, but not before the buses carried more than 60,000 passengers and earned the interest of at least four European cities that are seeking to install the buses.
“Five years ago, was hard to convince them. We had to try 16 cities to [get permission to] operate in three. But after that, we had a lot more cities coming knocking on our door,” he said.
Other demonstrations have been carried out in the Netherlands, Sweden and other countries, including one event in Amsterdam in April where transportation ministers from across Europe were ferried about in self-driving cars.
“We made sure a lot of the bicycles were out of the way because that’s really challenging,” said Tom Alkim, senior adviser for automated driving in the Netherlands’ Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment.
The ministers went on to sign the Declaration of Amsterdam, which committed European Union member states to “work towards a coherent European framework for the deployment of interoperable connected and automated driving, which should be available, if possible, by 2019,” according to the document.
