California is one step closer to becoming the second state in the nation to officially have laws governing robot-controlled cars.
The state Senate unanimously passed such a measure following a near-unanimous vote by the Assembly earlier in the week. The bill now heads to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk, where it is expected to be signed into law. The legislation calls on the California Department of Motor Vehicles to begin developing standards and licensing procedures for these autonomous vehicles.
Nevada passed its own law last year, and set up standards back in February. Since automakers already use the state’s wide open roads to test mainstream cars, legislators likely saw allowing testing of self-driving vehicles as a good move for business. The cars will sport red Nevada license plates and still require a driver behind the wheel.
In California, this week’s move was only to make the use of self-driving cars legal. The DMV now sets up the actual policies, so it’s not clear quite yet if a driver will still need to be behind the wheel there as well. Most likely that answer will be yes, considering the whole idea of robot-driven cars is really still in the testing phase at the moment.
The lack of regulations has certainly not stopped Google from testing its own cars
on California roads. The company’s headquarters are located in Mountain
View, and by 2010 its fleet of robot-powered Priuses had already driven
more than 140,000 miles with very little human intervention. Google recently boasted two weeks ago that they had surpassed 300,000 miles without a single crash, a signal that the self driving car may be closer than we think.While this may seem like a great accomplishment, we have to temper our enthusiasm just a bit.
Even in the most advanced versions of Google’s cars, the sensor arrays required to make the car drive itself are pretty obnoxious looking. No one is going to want to buy a car with an unsightly mast on its roof. The cars also have significant problems in bad weather: for example in snow where road markings are covered, Google says the car has trouble detecting where the road is.
These types of issues will need to be fixed well before the self-driving car becomes a consumer product — so while states may now be allowing these vehicles on the road, don’t expect to be behind the wheel of one anytime soon.
