NHTSA Chief: Autonomous Cars Don’t Have to Be “Perfect”

Tesla has recently come under fire for remaining committed to Autopilot despite a fatal crash of a Model S using the semi-autonomous technology. And although it’s investigating the Model S incident, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stands by the importance of autonomous cars.

“No one incident will derail the Department of Transportation and NHTSA from its mission to improve safety on the roads by pursuing new lifesaving technologies,” said NHTSA chief Mark Rosekind at a recent conference.

Federal regulators are now writing guidelines to advise others on the safe deployment of automated vehicles. Those rules should come out by late summer, NHTSA says. Rosekind admits autonomous vehicles must be “much safer” than human drivers to make sense, but they needn’t be perfect. About 94 percent of car crashes are caused by human error, and NHTSA says autonomous technologies could help reduce the prevalence of those accidents.

“If we wait for perfect, we’ll be waiting for a very, very long time,” he said. “How many lives might we be losing while we wait?” Rosekind noted self-driving cars will make mistakes and will learn from those mistakes as more data is gathered. Human drivers, however, continue to make the same mistakes others have made.

Consumer Reports has called on Tesla to dial back some features of its Autopilot system, although Tesla disagrees. Tesla notes its Autopilot system is still in Beta, and says it will continue to educate consumers on how to use the technology.

Source: Reuters

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