Advertisement

California delays rule-making deadline for driverless cars

"It's not like any manufacturer is trying to skirt around some safety rules," Chrysler’s Ross Good said in 2013.

By Brooks Hays
Google's driverless car. Photo by Google
Google's driverless car. Photo by Google

SACRAMENTO, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- California and Michigan are ground zero for the development of self-driving vehicles -- cutting-edge technology that could drastically change the ways of the road.

As often happens, government regulators will be forced to react to changing technology, but California's DMV has now delayed any new rule-making until more information on safety is collected.

Advertisement

Earlier this year, California's state legislature set a deadline for the Department of Motor Vehicles to craft rules governing the use of driverless cars. But the DMV says it is pushing back the deadline to gather more information from industry representatives, consumer safety advocates and academic experts before beginning the rule-making process.

Google has already built a self-driving prototype they say will begin being tested on Northern California streets in 2015. Similar models from BMW and Mercedes-Benz are also in the works.

California's DMV held a workshop on the emerging technology and the relevant public safety concerns in 2013, and again this year. At both meetings, manufacturers insisted that developers were taking all the necessary safety precautions.

"It's not like any manufacturer is trying to skirt around some safety rules," Chrysler's Ross Good told officials in 2013. Volkswagon's Barbara Wendling echoed that sentiment this year, saying "no worries that anybody in the industry is going to put an unsafe product into California or any other state."

Advertisement

Such promises are unlikely to suffice, however, just two years after the accelerator recall debacle that plagued Toyota and was blamed for more than a dozen deaths.

As of now, there are no federal safety standards governing driverless cars.

Latest Headlines