The Evolving Safety and Policy Challenges of Self-Driving Cars

By: Mark McCarthy (Brookings)

Fully autonomous taxis without safety drivers are already operating on the streets in select U.S. cities like San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. As political commentator Matt Yglesias recently noted in his blog, “autonomous taxis are no longer a hypothetical future technology. They exist, and you can ride in them.” In San Francisco, they’ve even become a tourist attraction.

Self-driving cars hold the potential to offer significant benefits, including improved road safety, increased mobility for those unable to drive, enhanced convenience for passengers, a more efficient and cost-effective transportation system (partly due to a reduced number of vehicles), and a lower environmental impact due to their smooth and controlled “eco-driving” compared to human drivers.

However, the challenges associated with self-driving cars are not a distant concern; they are pressing issues for U.S. policymakers today. Policymakers are struggling to keep pace with these rapid advancements and have yet to establish an effective regulatory framework that ensures public safety concerns are adequately addressed.

The following initial observations aim to clarify these challenges. Future posts will explore the safety of self-driving cars in more detail, the necessary regulatory structures for their public deployment, and the assignment of liability in accidents involving self-driving vehicles. The goal is to summarize the ongoing discussions about safety and regulation and contribute to developing a regulatory regime that supports the safe deployment of self-driving cars.

CONTINUE READING…