Let’s not block the road to driverless cars

For all of President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises about bringing back millions of jobs to middle America, 2017 is shaping up to be one of the machine not the human.

Artificial intelligence is almost ready for prime time – and the impact will be felt much sooner than many people believe. Consider the burgeoning industry for driverless cars.

Merrill Lynch is projecting fully autonomous taxis could account for more than 40 percent of all new vehicle sales within the next two decades, potentially putting millions of cabbies and truck drivers out of work. And that’s to say nothing of highly automated factories where these vehicles likely will be built. Car ownership will begin to move from something personal to something more like an appliance or a service – at least that’s how old-line automakers such as Ford and upstarts like Tesla are seeing it.

Google wants to start selling its autonomous vehicles by 2020 Ford says it’s rolling out driverless cars for a ride-sharing service by 2021. Tesla has similar plans. The industry is expected to be worth $42 billion globally by 2025 and only grow from there.

So far, 20 companies have jumped at the chance to test some 130 driverless cars on California roads. They all agreed to apply for special permits from the Department of Motor Vehicles and to abide by rules requiring a driver with a clean record to be present at all times and that all malfunctions be reported to the state – among other things.

But there’s concern that California’s regulations might be getting in the way.

Normally, this wouldn’t be concern for a state known as a safe haven for innovation. But with Uber’s abrupt departure for Arizona in December after a feud with regulators over filing for a permit to operate its driverless Volvos in San Francisco, it’s become a real concern.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, of course, sees Uber’s pending road tests near Phoenix as a sign his state is “paving the way” to pilfer more tech businesses from California. Ducey unfairly claims California “puts the brakes on innovation and change with more bureaucracy and more regulation.”

California’s regulations for autonomous vehicles aren’t exactly onerous. Along with a $150 fee and 72-hour waiting period, the rules are designed to ensure public safety – not thwart innovation. But California’s rules might as well be an encyclopedia compared to the two-page executive order Ducey signed to authorize driverless technology on Arizona’s roads.

In Pennsylvania, customers are already riding in driverless Ubers. Autonomous vehicles can already operate on Florida’s roads without a driver behind the wheel. Of course, it was in Florida last year where a passenger died in a driverless Tesla. Elsewhere, a driverless car ran into sandbags, another into a bus and during the longest driverless test drive, the human had to take over when the car encountered construction and didn’t know what to do. As an experiment, a researcher pointed a laser-pointer at a driverless car and threw its computer into a tizzy. Idiots pointed lasers at airliners some 3,900 times in 2014, so what’s to stop them from messing with a car?

Uber pulling its Volvos from California isn’t a huge deal – it’s only 16 cars, and Uber’s argument about why it didn’t need a permit is shaky. The company should recognize safety concerns are real.

But regulators and the Legislature must also recognize that getting in the way of technology has a cost. Yes, they must protect public safety, but they also must not become a roadblock to progress.

This story was originally published January 5, 2017 at 12:53 PM with the headline "Let’s not block the road to driverless cars."