But I KNOW DAMNED WELL they’re a bad idea when designed by a gaggle of senators.
A trio of senators plan to establish a new model for regulating self-driving vehicles, with the hope that the new technology could cut the number of deadly car crashes.
“Self-driving vehicle technology will have a transformational impact on highway safety,” Senate Commerce Chairman John Thune, R-S.D., said Tuesday. “Working on a bipartisan basis, we continue to make progress in writing what we expect will become the first ever changes in federal law helping usher in this new transportation era.”
To ease those developments, Thune and other lawmakers plan to craft legislation to set safety standards while keeping regulations light enough for the technology to flourish. The senators also hope to “educate the public to encourage responsible adoption of self-driving vehicles,” according to a list of policy principles released Tuesday.
So! Now we know how the species ends. Nice to have that out of the way, I guess.
As soon as they get the driverless car regulations sorted out, they’ll move right along to doing the same thing for flying cars, with George Jetson as a consultant.
I feel so much safer already.
I’ve become slowly convinced that driverless cars are inevitable, and that robot drivers will be at least as good as the human variety (that’s not really a high bar). I think that this will happen by the time I’m old enough to need it.
Will I be able to afford it then? That’s a different question!
That that is funny. I’ve always held that if a see a driverless vehicle on the highway with me, I have to assume the driver is dead or otherwise incapacitated and it’s best to just force it into the wall. There’s your “transformational impact” right there.