With two of my least favorite uber-left US senators now pushing for an investigation into Tesla as to the 11 deaths occurring in self-driving Tesla cars, I think it’s a good idea to outline why I think safe self-driving is coming a LOT sooner to everyone than people think and policymakers would be very wise to go light with the regulatory approach. First off, the self-driving cars only have to become safer than humans a reduce accident rates overall to be worth it. They do NOT have to eliminate accidents. There is this constant emphasis in the media and among less serious lawmakers on changing policy when bad things happen that are less bad than the alternative. If your self-driving car outperforms you as a driver, on average, then the self-driving car should be used.
Second, these companies and these technologies evolve. Policymakers who believe that v1 through v10 of self-driving cars should be regulated because they fail often don’t consider v11 that solves the problems in v1 to v10. Tesla has been big on this, evaluating their failures one by one and working on the fix. The technology continues to evolve and improve. There are so many feature sets yet to come on self-driving technology – things like networked cars talking to each other on safety, evolution on making the car feel much more like how a safe human driver would drive, software updates that improve all kinds of things like energy efficiency. These are the things that are coming out now. Future self-driving technology will be almost unrecognizable to today’s human driving cars.
Third, policymakers always should recognize that new technologies fail, early and often, and they still have to be supported until they are proven NOT to work. What innovators like Elon Musk do is self-correct because they see the big picture of how immense these self-driving cars will be for society. Imagine a world where a set of networked self-driving cars are dominant – accident reduction would be immense and all limited access highways would be as smooth as butter.
Anyway, democrats love to solve problems where there are none. Should there be intense safety protocols around self-driving cars? Yes. But are accidents proof that those safety protocols aren’t working? No. Review and assess, and improve. And in the first place make sure the cars are fundamentally working in most situations, which they already are.
