The world has moved quickly from wonder at the idea of driverless cars to impatient expectation. The Cadillac SRX zipping around a test track in suburban Detroit is flashing a sign: Not so fast.
The car can pilot itself at highway speed while the person in the driver’s seat eats a hamburger.
Yet the first versions of General Motors’ autonomous vehicles, due out by 2020, will drive themselves only on controlled-access highways, such as an interstate. Don’t count on them to avoid accidents on their own; it will be up to a licensed driver behind the wheel to avoid the deer running out from the roadside. The reasons are parts technological, regulatory and psychological.
“The technology’s probably doable, but how do we implement it, how do we regulate it and how do we standardize it?” said Michelle Krebs, senior analyst with auto researcher , based in Santa Monica, Calif., in an interview. What’s more, “There are certain people who want to be in control, and they don’t want driving taken away from them.”
The cautiousness in developing fully autonomous technology, such as that envisioned by Google Inc., reflects what GM officials say is a realistic view of what consumers will accept and what the rules of the road will allow.
In the U.S., the federal government oversees vehicle safety, and each state regulates insurance and licensing drivers.
Insurers and state authorities will have to decide how to assign liability and responsibility for an accident if an inanimate object rather than a person is driving.
“You’re going to have to have some kind of regulatory foundations in place at a reasonably nascent place,” said Bill Visnic, an analyst who follows autonomous vehicles for . “Or else everybody’s going to get the feeling it’s the Wild West out there.”
Ninety percent of respondents in a survey sponsored by insurer Chubb Corp., and released by ORC International Ltd. last week, said a licensed driver should be in the driver’s seat of a driverless car. Of the survey’s 1,000 respondents, only one-third said they would feel safe on a road with autonomous vehicles.
The same obstacles likely exist in other countries, Visnic said.
U.S. auto-safety regulators in May released their first draft of an autonomous-vehicles policy. National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator David Strickland has said so-called active-safety technologies that lead to self-driving cars are the next step in cutting U.S. highway deaths.
The policy encourages development of technologies envisioned as components of autonomous vehicles. Those include wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems, brakes that apply themselves when a crash is sensed to be imminent, and sensors that are as accurate as or better than human vision.
So far, only three U.S. states — California, Florida and Nevada — plus the District of Columbia have laws or rules spelling out how autonomous vehicles may be used on their roads.
Recognizing the policy and regulatory debates ahead, GM has designed its prototype so it wouldn’t require any changes to laws or regulations to operate, said John Capp, GM’s lead for active-safety-technology strategy.
“It makes sense that cars will be able to drive themselves in the future,” Capp said in an interview. “But getting there is a lot of work.”
Dubbed Super Cruise, the self-driving sport utility vehicle’s technology builds on an adaptive-cruise-control system on which development began about 15 years ago and now is available on many luxury vehicles, as well as some mainstream models.
GM learned from testing on “hundreds of thousands of miles around the country” that small bits of road debris that a human driver would know to drive over without much thought could confuse a self-driving car, said Jeremy Salinger, head of Super Cruise research and development. Engineers have worked on radars to avoid such surprises.
