California Is Officially Embracing the Self-Driving Car

The much despised notion of driverless cars, has now been relooked at by the California government.

Rules of Testing and deployment of fully self-driving vehicles has just been issued by Californian last week. It would seem that by the end of 2017, California may accept vehicles driven autonomously on state roads.

"This is a big deal," said Jason Orr, an attorney who follows autonomous vehicle law at O'Melveny & Myers. "Despite being more sensitive than other states, at the end of the day, it will potentially result in wide scale deployment of autonomous vehicles."

California's DMV has frowned upon the self-driving car industry in the past, implying that state regulators were hindering the innovation of public safety methods.

 

In the past the DMV missed the targeted date for autonomous vehicle rules, and when it was eventually released, at the end of 2015 the rule it omitted the use of fully self-driving vehicles, due to safety concerns.

Since then, tech companies, such as Google (GOOGL, Tech30) and Uber, who had to resort to conducting tests outside of their home states?

For many years, the California DMV fought the notion of how to ultimately sign off on an autonous car operating on government roads.

Although many specialists believe that self-driving cars will ultimately be the safer option, right now they will have their flaws and may not be better than the human driver.

Through the world governments struggle to accept how it can be certified that a completely self-driven car vehicle is perfectly safe to navigate on public roads through traffic.

In the past, the DMV considered using a 3rd party to inspect vehicle data, or external test tracks for self-driven cars. However, last week it revealed it would now allow manufacturers to self-certify that their vehicles are actually safe.

In a briefing with reporters, California DMV deputy director Brian Soublet downplayed the different approaches to putting humans and robots on public roads.

"It's a minimal test. It's basically seeing that they have the skills to operate the vehicle," Soublet said the driver's test for humans. "And there's all of the post-licensing discipline that goes with it. We believe that that same type of a structure is being established here."

Just as the DMV can revoke a human's license, it can also revoke a company's ability to operate self-driving cars on state roads, under the proposed rules. The DMV will exercise this right if it sees recurring safety issues with a vehicle, according to Soublet.