Automated Vehicle Crashes Now Need To Be Reported Within 24 Hours

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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a new order that all Assisted Driving and self-driving vehicle manufacturers, including Tesla, must report crashes within 24 hours. This comes after an increasing number of manufacturers have added advanced driver assistance systems to their vehicles, as well as furthering research and testing being conducted on fully automated self-driving vehicles. This order will provide the NHTSA with a lot of information to enhance safety.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that incorporate sensors and cameras have been around for a while now, helping drivers avoid collisions whenever possible. The chances are, most people have some form of ADAS in their vehicle. This may come in the form of parking sensors, blind spot sensors, or even cameras that help maintain a certain distance behind other vehicles in cruise control. On the other hand, automated driving systems vehicles (ADS), are much less common. They tend not to be readily available to the public, and mainly because there is a lot of technology involved that hasn’t quite been fleshed out yet. ADS vehicles are fully automated vehicles, that normally travel with a driver behind the wheel who is there to make sure the vehicle performs tasks properly and safely. In an ADS vehicle, there are a lot of individual parts that need to function properly in order for the car to move safely.

Related: Why California DMV Is Now Investigating Tesla Over Full Self-Driving

Understandably, there is a lot of concern about these vehicles making it to market. They are already being developed and researched thoroughly, and some have even started testing in limited quantities like Waymo One, a self-driving ride-hailing service that will transport people in Metro Pheonix, AR. The company started under Google in 2009 and has since developed into what seems to be a very safe and competent project. However, there are still major concerns that the NHTSA wants to understand better. Hence the reason an order was put in place for every incident that involves either an ADAS or ADS vehicle to be reported to the NHTSA within 24 hours. Specifically, crashes that “involve a hospital-treated injury, a fatality, a vehicle tow-away, an airbag deployment, or a vulnerable road user such as a pedestrian or bicyclist” must be reported within one day. The goal is to fully understand the system failures that can happen, enabling the NHTSA to confidently “oversee the safety of automated vehicles.”

These accidents do happen even when they aren’t supposed to, and a lot of times they are due to human error. In an ideal world, the NHTSA will take the information it collects under this new order and help manufacturers to develop safer and smart autonomous driving. At the same time, oversight from the NHTSA could in theory slow down the progress these manufacturers are making. Currently, it’s a little too early to speculate what this means for ADS and ADAS car and software manufacturers, but the NHTSA claims, “This data will help the agency identify potential safety issues and impacts resulting from the operation of advanced technologies on public roads and increase transparency.” If that’s the case, concern around autonomous vehicles could lessen as manufacturers get better at incorporating new safety measures into their systems.

Autonomous vehicles that are classified as ADS vehicles are not fully fleshed out and there’s no telling how long it could be before fully autonomous vehicles are driving without anyone behind the wheel or in constant supervision from a satellite location. Companies like Waymo and Tesla are aiming for this to be the case in the coming years, and while advanced driver-assisted systems have already saved lives, the proposals by the NHTSA will hopefully make the industry even safer.

Next: Has Elon Musk’s Boring Company Just Invented The Train Tunnel?

Source: NHTSA

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