Driverless cars immune from traffic tickets in California under current laws
Mounting concerns over self-driving cars — headlined by allegations that autonomous vehicle maker Cruise misled the California Department of Motor Vehicles about an accident in San Francisco that seriously injured a pedestrian — have some people questioning whether the state needs new laws and new watchdogs to govern the technology’s rapid expansion.
Mounting concerns over self-driving cars — headlined by allegations that autonomous vehicle maker Cruise misled the California Department of Motor Vehicles about an accident in San Francisco that seriously injured a pedestrian — have some people questioning whether the state needs new laws and new watchdogs to govern the technology’s rapid expansion.
City streets serve as testing grounds for hundreds of self-driving cars in California, despite ongoing safety concerns and gray areas surrounding law enforcement’s ability to cite robot cars when they violate traffic laws.
“I think all of us are still struggling to understand whether [driverless cars] really are safer than human drivers and in what ways they might not be,” said Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.
Autonomous vehicle makers say their cars need to keep logging miles to improve the technology and make them safer. Raicu pointed out, however, that much of the testing happens on city streets alongside human drivers and pedestrians, and there’s still much we don’t know about how the vehicles perform.
“It seems like while they make fewer of the kind of mistakes that we see from human drivers, they make interesting new kinds of mistakes,” Raicu said. “It has the feel of a human subject mass experiment, right? Without the kind of consent that we usually want to see as part of that.”
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