Two United States senators are now working to attach a certain legislation allowing automakers to deploy a massive wave of thousands of self-driving vehicles on the roads of the United States through a bipartisan China bill. This bill is a particularly significant reform that could drastically speed up the whole commercial use of automated vehicles.
US-China Tech War
Senator Gary Peters and John Thune have both circulated a draft amendment that was seen by Reuters which could grant the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or NHTSA the general power to initially exempt over 15,000 self-driving vehicles per manufacture from the safety standards written along when human drivers are in place. This figure would later on rise to 80,000 within the next three years.
According to the story by South China Morning Post, the pair currently hope to win the Senate Commerce Committee approval for the bipartisan China bill which would provide a whopping $100 billion for science and technology research and development funding over certain concerns of the US-China tech war. The amendment would also reportedly allow self-driving companies to disable the human driving controls in their vehicles once in full self-driving mode.
Bipartisan China Bill
This amendment comes after growing concerns regarding crashes involving Tesla's own driver assistance system Autopilot which does allow handless driving tasks but still does not make the actual vehicle anonymous. The bipartisan China bill says that the US could risk losing its own technological leadership in the large autonomous vehicle industry.
The bill says that the global market opportunity is now estimated to be worth US$8 trillion. The US could lose technological leadership unless it would enact certain policies to protect its own leadership against China and some other competitors. Peters, who now chairs a certain subcommittee overseeing the whole NHTSA noted that the amendment will ensure that the innovation as well as the testing made around autonomous vehicles can continue with the driving safety standards under the help of the Department of Transportation.
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Opposition to the Bill
Both Thune and Peters have reportedly been working for four years in order to try to win congressional approval making it easier to deploy those self-driving cars. Thune noted that providing the whole automotive industry with the specific tools that they need to safely both test and deploy automated vehicles throughout the nation will reportedly create thousands of different jobs and even generate billions of dollars when it comes to investment.
Thune also mentioned that there are also a lot of safety benefits that automatic vehicles have the potential to give. The effort now faced opposition coming from some which included the American Association for Justice, which currently represents trial lawyers, who all argue that the bill currently doesn't have enough safeguards in order to protect consumer rights.
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Written by Urian Buenconsejo
