I think a lot of people are misreading this. Right now one of the rules to pass a crash test is that there is a steering wheel. This didn't used to be controversial, but now it is. The rules were written in the 70s and just assumed there would always be a drivers seat.

The only thing here is that the government rewrote the rules to no longer assume those things. It's not saying those things aren't necessary, just not required. If the car can meet all the safety standards without it, then that's fine.

It would be like saying today that you can't have a computer without an on/off switch because in the 70s every computer had a physical switch.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most important in my mind is that the risk of the vehicle being hacked and carjacked remotely is always present.

With the presence of an automation kill-switch and manual human controls the driver can always take back control.

Without those, the driver is at the mercy of the hacker.

Vehicle automation falls under the SCADA sub-domain of cyber-security. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and the cyber-security in SCADA systems is light-years behind. Pro-tip: going into cyber and want a good certification (if such a thing exists)..then get CISSP-SCADA.

Some relevant articles:

[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/how-to-hack-a-self-driving-car/

[2] https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-self-driving-cars-vulnera...

[3] https://blog.tesu.edu/should-we-be-worried-about-the-hacking...

I think any automated vehicle, no matter how advanced, should always have a big red button to make it stop whatever it's doing. Kind of like the emergency brake on a passenger train.

If your vehicle is heading relentlessly toward a group of schoolchildren it would be nice to have a way to override it. Either that or no windows so you won't be haunted by it every night of your life.

I was at a crosswalk and saw a car with the big cameras on top coming

Normally I walk and have confidence the human will stop and not want the consequences, or I at least make eye contact with the human driver for reassurance they will stop

This time I ran, mumbling “self driving car fuck that”

Where's that video of the guy's dash cam showing what full autonomous driving in a Tesla is currently like, the one where it keeps trying to drive him head first in to other vehicles. I'm hoping this is just intended for on-campus shuttles or something.

This is like the least important area of this topic, and like 100 steps ahead of where we are now.

I would go further - if the vehicle is autonomous, it should be illegal for it to have a steering wheel.

The idea that you can make a deadly self-driving car, and then jail the driver because he could not react in 0.2 seconds when your car suddenly swerved is the greatest handover of money and power to corporations since the times of slavery.

So make the choice clear - either tha car has controls, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, there will be no temptation to blame the passenger

The first sentence of this article has an interesting reading:

"U.S. regulators on Thursday issued final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to meet crash standards."

It does sound like "U.S. regulators are removing regulations.", which does look like they are acting against themselves..

I wonder if many of the problems with automatic driving could be solved using platooning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpuwG4A56r0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Re__KRr4NU).

There could be dedicated lanes assigned to the autonomous cars and platooning-protocols that ensure that the cars use their automatic capabilities only on relatively safe highways, only queued between other autonomic vehicles.

Should be a more predictable environment and thereby safer

Look, I'm generally on the bull-ish side of autonomous driving, but this is almost akin to the feds passing laws on science fiction. Section 180.99 part alpha: "Minimum size of a Ringworld is mercury orbit around a red dwarf"

I guess we can always drive with a USB-plugin gamepad if there's a glitch or a central system outage?

This would actually represent progress if they eliminated the requirement for side mirrors, which from what I've read of good aerodynamic designs is responsible for as much drag as the body of the car.

I took my first self-driving ride last night. One of the wildest parts was watching the steering wheel and hearing the pedals move on their own.

This feels like getting the cart before the horse. As far as I’m aware (and as has been proven by car companies’ continuing inability to produce a safely self driving vehicle) there’s no standard test for what counts as an ”automated driving system (ADS) vehicle” capable of safely navigating public roads.

Regulators shouldn’t just take for profit companies’ word that a vehicle is automated. There should be a standard battery of tests which a vehicle must pass to be considered automated.

Allowing companies to get rid of controls just because they pinky swear the vehicle can handle driving safely in all foreseeable conditions is a sure way to end up with needless death and injury due to the same dynamics that were written in the book Unsafe at any Speed.

The safety and regulatory framework should exist before the activity is allowed rather than waiting until the inevitable deaths and injuries and relying on the families of the deceased to petition congress.

No steering wheels or brake pedals! Feels scary but we are giving technology way more control over our lives already :-).

You always want a physical failsafe control (i.e. big red button for emergency stop)... it's not clear if nhtsa requires that or not.

The practicality of manually driving is not going away. Just this week my neighbor was driving up and down his driveway to transport some heavy packages received.

Reading between the lines here this just makes me think that the regulator has become captured by the industry.

This is like removing human control on an autonomous Russian roulette revolver that shoots to the side if it detects a person in front of the barrel, then praying for the best.

The first person to get hit (in their non-automated vehicle) with the automated vehicle being at fault will have a field day with this in court.

Those men know what it means to turn the keys, and some are just not up to it!

Now, it's as simple as that!

I think we oughta take the men out of the loop.

I could imagine a bus on a fixed route not having controls. This doesn't have to apply universally...

There could definitely be a number of use-cases beyond taxis/individual cars. This is why top-tier regulations like this need to be broad. You can refine it at the vehicle category level.

This is a great step forward, autonomous driving only needs to be better than the average human.

The average human is often too busy texting, or eating to pay attention.

Humans do very stupid things in cars, it's a part of why I won't really consider living anywhere where I have to own one. Holy crap, you'll see people literally just rear-end each other at stoplights because you want to keep itching closer.

One of the most common complaints about automated cars is they go The speed limit, I recall once I was literally at the exact speed limit for the highway and I flicked on the cruise control. Immediately a driver behind me started honking and flicking me off.

Like holy shit I'm not from around here. I'm not going to risk getting pulled over because you're 5 minutes late to brunch or something.

The average human is such a horrible driver. I don't think Tesla bots can do much worse. The times the Tesla AI fails are very rare and far between, the times some idiot human decides they're going to rear end someone, or change lanes to late are very common.

All hell the robocar overlords

If we think we have class antagonism and rural vs. urban antagonism now, wait until self-driving trucks decimate trucking as an industry. It's one of the largest well-paying employers of "blue collar" people. We are still a ways off but it's definitely coming.

We have to do something about inequality or we will have totalitarianism. It will either be in the form of a totalitarian fascist or communist revolution, or a totalitarian police state to prevent such a revolution.

Looks like the point of the change is that all-passenger hardware configuration is now allowed, just like there is no reason you can't make a tablet PC with no keyboard. Slightly different from "self driving cars are now allowed on the road".

This will never fly in Europe. So the cars will have both system regardless

It should open up the possibility of facing backwards, assuming you don't have motion sickness, it's a much safer position to be in to dissipate energy in case of a crash.

I'm just thinking about legal shitstorm that will happen when completely autonomous vehicle would kill a pedestrian for example.

What's going to be the rate of 'acceptable loss'? There's an obvious point on the cost curve where companies will begin pushing for driverless tech before the problem is fully solved. Without some standardized 'miles between intervention' requirement that accounts for the externality on innocent bystanders, the emergent behavior will be to remove the human in the loop before the societally optimal point. If I save $100M in staffing costs by firing all my human monitors and only incur $10M in payouts to the people my cars run over, the capitalist choice is clear.

Vehicles == Automobiles (in this case).

There are other vehicles besides autos (aircraft, boats, ships, tanks). Need to be more specific.

What if the autonomous vehicle is on a curve next to a cliff and loses power?

Maybe ejection seats requirement should be an added clause.

danger is a driverless car turning left onto a bridge that has washed away during a flood, mistaking the map for the territory, it drives us off the bridge because we've eliminated the brakes because we think the car is smarter than the human inside it

... And with that women said "eff that!" nailing the coffin of the FAV

Send them to Poland and require to pass Polish driving license exam.

And how to drive in exotic places or after a disaster?

And so the slippery slope becomes more slippery.

Who's going to underwrite the insurance?

Without paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20220311164526/https://www.reute...

Cyberpunk future, here we come.

This is akin to removing the requirement for unicorns to wear horseshoes on the public road.