California, especially Northern California, is a state in which many tech companies base their main operations. This means many new, innovative projects begin their testing stages in the state as well. One of the biggest pieces of new tech in testing phases currently is the autonomous car, or self-driving car to put it more simply. San Francisco has especially been a main hub of testing for these vehicles, which means their streets are the ones facing the most risks and damages while the manufacturers work out the kinks in their tech. With the ways current laws are set up, these vehicles are safe from traffic laws that human operated vehicles are subject to. This, however, may just be changing after a few incidents occurred.
One self-driving manufacturer, Cruise, withheld some truths about an incident that involved one of their vehicles. When out doing a test drive, one of their vehicles was in a traffic collision that led to a pedestrian being seriously injured. Cruise was not very helpful to the DMV with regard to the incident, leading to many questions as to why they are immune from traffic laws.
The argument has reached a bit of a standstill.
On one side, there are the manufacturers who argue that the vehicles need to get miles of testing in in order to better improve their performance. Opponents to the vehicles, such as Irina Raicu, the director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University, argues that, since these tests are conducted on streets with human drivers and human pedestrians, there is a major risk that must be recognized. Raicu and others who agree with her argue that because we know so little about the technology used in these vehicles, nor how they handle most driving situations, we need to have laws in place to regulate them a bit more.
There is recorded evidence of many driverless cars running red lights, not moving for emergency vehicles, and even driving into construction zones. The manufacturers have programmed the vehicles to avoid common human driver errors, but now the vehicles are making less common, and even completely new, errors that pose major risks.
The way in which current laws are written is what allows these vehicles to continue making these errors.
Laws surrounding traffic citations are written to specify that a driver must be present in the car for law enforcement to be allowed to hand out a ticket. This has created a weird, gray area where now nothing can be done to admonish autonomous vehicles and their manufacturers. Many hope that while this tech continues to advance exponentially, laws catch up to it as well.
