Tesla and Waymo executives defend the safety of self-driving cars before Senate committee
Washington (CBS NEWS) — Sources from CBS say top executives at Tesla and Waymo made the case for the safety of their vehicles before a Senate committee on Wednesday, insisting their driving systems are safer than human drivers, despite recent incidents.
Congress is considering how to move forward with legislation to create uniform safety regulations to govern self-driving vehicles, which are becoming increasingly common in major cities. Roughly half of U.S. states currently have differing laws and regulations governing self-driving cars, while others don’t, creating a patchwork regulatory system.
Senators on the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Wednesday expressed an eagerness to eliminate avoidable crashes from distracted or otherwise impaired drivers through autonomous vehicles, but also expressed concerns about recent autonomous vehicle incidents.
“Fully autonomous vehicles offer the potential to reduce crashes on roads, but we have seen the risk of letting companies beta test on our roads with no guardrails,” said the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington.
Last month, the National Transportation Safety Board announced it opened an investigation into Waymo robotaxis passing and failing to yield to school buses after a series of incidents in Austin, Texas, which Sen. Ted Cruz, the committee chairman, told CBS News is “obviously unacceptable.” In Santa Monica, California, earlier this month, a Waymo vehicle struck a child near her elementary school. The child, who the company said darted out from behind another vehicle, suffered minor injuries.
Waymo previously said it identified a software issue and launched an update in November to address the issue, but has since received multiple violations.
Tesla recently started rolling out its robotaxi service in Austin. Its vehicles may have experienced crash rates worse than human drivers last year, a report that analyzed NHTSA data showed. Tesla did not respond to CBS News’ request for comment.
Cruz asked Mauricio Peña, Waymo’s chief safety officer, what safeguards they’ve put in place since the Austin and Santa Monica incidents.
“We take those incidents very seriously,” Peña said. “Safety is our top priority, especially the safety of children and pedestrians. We are evaluating every one of those events and developing fixes to address them, and we have already incorporated many changes to our software to dramatically improve our performance. And we are working with the Austin Independent School District to collect data on different lighting patterns and different conditions, and we’re also incorporating those learnings into our systems. We do safely navigate thousands of school bus encounters every single week, and we are continuously learning and improving because our work on safety is never done.”
Peña said Waymo’s analysis into the girl struck by a Waymo vehicle “found that the Waymo driver would have responded faster than our models of an attentive human driver. So in this case, I believe that we mitigated harm.”
Peña insisted Waymo vehicles are still much safer than cars driven by humans.
“In over 100 million miles, our data shows that we are 10 times less likely to be involved in a serious injury collision as compared to human drivers in the cities where we operate,” Peña said. “And data also shows we are 12 times less likely to be involved in a pedestrian injury collision in the cities where we operate, so I think we’re making a difference already.”
Bryant Walker Smith, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina, told the committee hearing there needs to be more oversight of autonomous vehicle companies.
“There are no self-driving or driverless cars,” Smith said. “The companies that develop and deploy AVs are the drivers. This means that an AV is only as safe as the companies responsible for it. We can and should proactively assess their trustworthiness.”
Lars Moravy, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, said the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a “legacy of safety” and the auto industry has made leaps and bounds in improvements to reduce vehicle crashes after the 1970s, but that progress has fallen flat in the last roughly 20 years. Now, around 40,000 people in the U.S. die each year in vehicle incidents.
“I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the next big jump we have in reducing that number from 40,000 to hopefully a day where it’s zero is autonomous driving,” Moravy said. “Simply put, an autonomous driver, the system or the computer that operates it, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t blink, and doesn’t get tired.”
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno asked who accepts liability for a collision resulting from a software or hardware failure.
“Of course, in the unlikely event that a software error occurred in our autonomous driving system, we would take liability for that event, much in the same way that a driver takes liability in our current legal system if they make an error,” Tesla’s Moravy said.
“Likewise,” Waymo’s Peña said.
Calls for federal rules to regulate safety standards
Wednesday’s hearing comes as Democrats and Republicans are calling for uniform federal standards for autonomous vehicles, although they may differ on what that looks like.
“If we want to save lives and avoid tragedy for almost 40,000 families each year, we don’t need lawmakers saddling automakers with expensive junk mandates that make little to no real difference,” Cruz said Wednesday. “Instead, we should follow the data, follow the evidence, which increasingly shows advanced AVs reduce crashes and prevent serious injuries. We need a consistent federal framework to ensure uniform safety standards, liability clarity and consumer confidence.”
Sen. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, sent letters Tuesday to the seven major autonomous vehicle companies requesting information regarding their remote assistance operations (RAOs) or the individual who intervenes when an autonomous vehicle gets into a sticky situation.
Markey wrote, “Without proper safeguards, the AV industry’s reliance on RAOs could create serious safety, national security, and privacy risks.” The letters call for more transparency in the AV industry, asking the companies questions such as if RAOs ever “tele-drive a vehicle” and how frequently do remote assistance sessions occur.
Markey is championing two new pieces of legislation aimed at making the autonomous vehicle industry more transparent.
The first bill, called the AV Safety Data Act, would require NHTSA to mandate AV vehicle data such as miles traveled, injuries involving human drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists and unplanned stoppages.
“We need more honesty from the industry so that there is in fact transparency in everything that they know that the American public should know as well,” Markey said.
Markey also partnered with Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal to introduce the “Stay in Your Lane Act.”
The bill would require autonomous vehicle manufacturers to define the roads and driving conditions in which their driving systems are safe and designed to operate in and would prohibit their vehicles from operating outside of those roads and conditions.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut sees it working similar to how airplane manufacturers can certify a plane as meeting FAA standards.
“Right now we have the Wild West. I want to see some rules of the road so that cars stay within their lanes, so to speak,” Blumenthal said.
