Driverless

On October 4, the U.S. Department of Transportation published Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Automated Vehicles 3.0 (“AV 3.0”), a policy vision statement that embraces automation as a critical tool to improve motor vehicle safety. AV 3.0 identifies several avenues to remove regulatory barriers to automated driving systems (“ADS”), including potential changes to rules that may stand in the way of driverless vehicles. These changes are of interest to automotive manufacturers, parts and systems suppliers, and technology companies.
Continue Reading IoT Update: DOT Publishes Policy Statement on Automated Vehicles

On April 6th, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued a Proposed Decision authorizing pilot testing for autonomous vehicles (AVs) in California. This action follows up on the California DMV’s permitting rules for AVs in California, which would have allowed driverless testing and deployment permits to issue as early as April 2 of this year. The DMV’s action was big news when it broke at the end of February; it meant that AVs could be deployed without any human in the vehicle. Now, the CPUC has proposed a pilot to allow the use of driverless test vehicles with passengers inside as soon as this summer.

While shared and electric mobility has already been deployed at scale, the road ahead for autonomy is still evolving. California is working to tackle this third pillar, and prior to the CPUC’s Proposed Decision, companies like Uber and GM Cruise had urged the Commission to move forward to enable the use of AVs for passenger transportation under existing regulatory frameworks. Lyft encouraged the Commission to address AVs in a rulemaking, noting that it “ma[de] little sense” to wait for Congress to act, or to “scramble” to regulate after AVs are already deployed en masse.

But now that the Proposed Decision has been published, stakeholders need to make sense of it.Continue Reading IoT Update: Will California’s New Autonomous Vehicles Regulations Provide a Roadmap for a National Regulatory Framework on Driverless Cars?