As federal officials prepare to hold a public hearing Friday on self-driving cars, a consumer-advocacy group is demanding that Google explain how safe – and unsafe – its self-driving cars are.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration s public meeting in Washington, D.C. is intended to help the agency develop guidelines for driver-less cars. Another meeting will be held in California this spring, but the date and location haven t been announced yet.
Google last month asked U.S. senators to fast-track regulations that would allow on the nation s roads self-driving cars with no brake pedals or steering wheels. The traffic safety administration said last month that U.S. Transportation Department research had concluded that there are few existing federal regulatory hurdles to deployment of automated vehicles with traditional designs and equipment to accommodate a human driver . . . [but] there may be greater obstacles to vehicle designs without controls for human drivers, such as a steering wheel or brake pedals.
Consumer Watchdog, a vocal opponent of rapid deployment of completely autonomous cars, on Thursday issued a list of questions it wanted federal officials to require Google to answer.
At the same time that Google wants to blow past federal safety requirements, the company has refused to provide detailed information that would enable the public, the press and policymakers to assess the safety and security of its autonomous cars, Consumer Watchdog founder Harvey Rosenfield said in a statement.
Consumer Watchdog wants Google to publish a list of all the real-life situations the cars cannot yet understand along with Google s plan for addressing those. It also wants the company to explain what will happen if a robot driver goes offline in a car carrying a passenger but having no steering wheel or pedals.
The group also demanded that Google publish all video and technical data associated with accidents and other anomalous situations involving its driver-less cars, and that it publish all its data on the vehicles safety, as well as its software algorithms for the robo-cars.The double-barreled question No. 6 is probably the most loaded of the 10: Do you expect one of your robot cars to be involved in a fatal crash? If your robot car causes the crash, how would you be held accountable?
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Photo: A Google driverless car navigating along a street in Mountain View in 2014 (AP Photo/Google)
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