NHTSA head floats plan to tolerate 19,149 excess traffic deaths per year before accepting autonomous-vehicle technology
I posted recently on what I consider unwarranted criticism of Tesla with regard to a recent tragic fatal crash involving a Tesla S operating with Autopilot engaged. In writing that post I came across but at first overlooked the significance of an appalling statement with regard to autonomous-vehicle safety.
As reported in Bloomberg, Mark Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, commented on autonomous vehicle safety last month at a conference in Novi, MI. “I’d actually like to throw the gauntlet down,” he said. “We need to start with two times better. We need to set a higher bar if we expect safety to actually be a benefit here.”
Think what this means. Traffic fatalities were 38,300 in 2015. He wants “two times better”—presumably only 19,150 fatalities. That’s a worthy goal! But his implication that we don’t “actually” get a “benefit” by cutting fatalities by only 19,149 boggles the mind!
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx plans to announce autonomous-auto regulations in July. Let’s hope I’ve misinterpreted or misunderstood Rosekind’s comment and the DoT will encourage immediate technological solutions to reducing carnage on our highways—even if technology can’t immediately cut fatalities by 50%.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post has a good editorial commenting on Tesla’s semi-autonomous functionality. “Tesla forces drivers to acknowledge that the system has limits before they can allow it to control the steering wheel,” the paper notes. “But the carmaker also named it ‘Autopilot,’ which suggested that the technology was more capable than it turned out to be. It is critical that the public not take the wrong lesson from this accident, dismissing all car automation technologies because this one appears to have been misused.”
