Mounting concerns over self-driving cars – headlined by allegations autonomous vehicle maker Cruise misled the DMV about an accident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian seriously injured – have some questioning whether the state needs new laws and new watchdogs to govern the technology’s rapid expansion.
City streets currently 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, 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 the cars safer. As Raicu points out, however, much of the testing is happening on city streets alongside human drivers and pedestrians, and there’s still much we don’t know about how the vehicles perform.
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