From 'horseless carriage' to 'driverless car,' are you ready?
I expect our mixed feelings will warm up over time, just as new technologies tend to be embraced more eagerly by younger generations. But for now those mixed feelings help to explain why two bills to regulate self-driving vehicles, the SELF DRIVE Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives and the AV START Act pending in the U.S. Senate, appear to be stalled amid other election-year politics.
As various states have created a complicated patchwork of regulations across the country, the industry eagerly seeks the consistency of federal laws. Yet consumer advocates and safety experts say the feds should tap their brakes until the new vehicles have been more thoroughly tested.
The public is with them on that, according to a new poll released Monday by Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a 29-year-old alliance of safety, consumer, public health and insurance organizations. It found that 69 percent of Americans said they were "concerned" about their safety when sharing the road with driverless vehicles as motorists, bicyclists and pedestrians.
And an even large majority of Americans, 84 percent, support the organization's push to delay acting on driverless car legislation until the National Transportation Safety Board can complete its investigations now underway of at least seven crashes, including four fatalities, and other failures that already have occurred with self-driving vehicles in the past three years.
They include a May 8 accident in which two teenagers died in the fire that resulted from the crash of a Tesla Model S into a wall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Another driver died on March 23 in a Tesla Model X that struck a safety barrier in in Mountain View, Calif. On March 18, an Uber test vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian walking a bicycle in Tempe, Ariz.
We've come a long way since James Lambert's horseless carriage hit that tree root. But if we're still a long way from seeing fleets of safe driver-free cars on the road, I can wait.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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