Collision in the Making Between Self-Driving Cars and How the World Works

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: January 23, 2012
SANTA CLARA, Calif. Even as Google tests its small fleet of self-driving vehicles on California
highways, legal scholars and government officials are warning that society has only begun
wrestling with the changes that would be required in a system created a century ago to meet the
challenge of horseless carriages.
What happens if a police officer wants to pull one of these vehicles over? When it stops at a fourway intersection, would it be too polite to take its turn ahead of aggressive human drivers (or
equally polite robots)? What sort of insurance would it need?
These and other implications of what Google calls autonomous vehicles were debated by Silicon
Valley technologists, legal scholars and government regulators last week at a daylong
symposium sponsored by the Law Review and High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara
University.
As Google has demonstrated, computerized systems that replace human drivers are now largely
workable and could greatly limit human error, which causes most of the 33,000 deaths and 1.2
million injuries that now occur each year on the nations roads.
Such vehicles also hold the potential for greater fuel efficiency and lower emissions and, more
broadly, for restoring the United States primacy in the global automobile industry.
But questions of legal liability, privacy and insurance regulation have yet to be addressed, and
an array of speakers suggested that such challenges might pose far more problems than the
technological ones.
Today major automobile makers have already deployed advanced sensor-based safety systems
that both assist and in some cases correct driver actions. But Googles project goes much further,
transforming human drivers into passengers and coexisting with conventional vehicles driven
by people.
Last month, Sebastian Thrun, director of Googles autonomous vehicle research program, wrote
that the project had achieved 200,000 miles of driving without an accident while cars were
under computer control.
Over the last two years, Google and automobile makers have been lobbying for legislative
changes to permit autonomous vehicles on the nations roads.

Nevada became the first state to legalize driverless vehicles last year, and similar laws have now
been introduced before legislatures in Florida and Hawaii. Several participants at the Santa
Clara event said a similar bill would soon be introduced in California.
Yet simple questions, like whether the police should have the right to pull over autonomous
vehicles, have yet to be answered, said Frank Douma, a research fellow at the Center for
Transportation Studies at the University of Minnesota. Its a 21st-century Fourth Amendment
seizure issue, he said.
The federal government does not have enough information to determine how to regulate
driverless technologies, said O. Kevin Vincent, chief counsel of the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration. But he added:
We think its a scary concept for the public. If you have two tons of steel going down the
highway at 60 miles an hour a few feet away from two tons of steel going in the exact opposite
direction at 60 miles an hour, the public is fully aware of what happens when those two hunks of
metal collide and theyre inside one of those hunks of metal. They ought to be petrified of that
concept.
And despite Googles early success, technological barriers remain. Some trivial tasks for human
drivers like recognizing an officer or safety worker motioning a driver to proceed in an
alternate direction await a breakthrough in artificial intelligence that may not come soon.
Moreover, even after intelligent cars match human capabilities, significant issues would remain,
suggested Sven A. Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford
University. Today, human drivers frequently bend the rules by rolling through stop signs and
driving above speed limits, he noted; how would a polite and law-abiding robot vehicle fare
against such competition?
Everybody might be bending the rules a little bit, he said. This is what the researchers are
telling me because the car is so polite it might be sitting at a four-way intersection forever,
because no one else is coming to a stop.
Because of the array of challenges, Dr. Beiker said he was wary about predicting when
autonomous vehicles might arrive. Twenty years from now we might have completely
autonomous vehicles, he said, maybe on limited roads.
Questions of legal liability and insurance are also unknown territory.