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Transportation

US To Decide on GM Request To Deploy Self-Driving Cars 54

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
U.S. regulators will soon decide on a petition filed by General Motors' Cruise self-driving technology unit seeking permission to deploy up to 2,500 self-driving vehicles annually without human controls, a top auto safety official said on Wednesday. From a report: The petition, filed in February 2022, seeks government approval to deploy vehicles annually without steering wheels, mirrors, turn signals or windshield wipers. National Highway Traffic Safety acting Administrator Ann Carlson said Wednesday the agency "will issue a decision "in the coming weeks."

"The central issue is deciding whether vehicles that are driven not by humans but by computers need to comply with safety standards that are fundamentally about human drivers: requirements for mirrors, sun visors, windshield wipers and so forth," Carlson said. Cruise currently offers a limited service in San Francisco with a small fleet of Chevrolet Bolt vehicles fitted with driverless technology. Cruise wants to deploy its Origin vehicle, which has subway-like doors and no steering wheels.
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US To Decide on GM Request To Deploy Self-Driving Cars More

US To Decide on GM Request To Deploy Self-Driving Cars

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  • no turn signals? so other cars / peds will not know what way they are moving?

    • Re:no turn signals? so other cars / ped will not k (Score:4, Insightful)

      by HBI ( 10338492 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @03:47PM (#63680959)

      I suspect it was about turn signal *controls*, not the signals themselves.

      • Re:no turn signals? so other cars / ped will not k (Score:5, Funny)

        by YetAnotherDrew ( 664604 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @03:54PM (#63680967)
        Either that or AI will instruct the human occupants when and which arms to deploy out windows.

      • I suspect it was about turn signal *controls*, not the signals themselves.

        It's not clear what GM is asking for. They definitely want exemptions from requirements for certain types of equipment. Some of the requests are not well thought out. For example, sun visors and windshield wipers will likely still be needed for passengers comfort, even if they aren't driving. That's why the front passenger has a sun visor. Imagine riding in a car in heavy rain so that it's hard to see the road ahead. That would be a scary experience for a passenger.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          You're assuming they have windows

          • That won't be until they have a captive audience, then they will replace the windows with ads. Or you will get a 10 second window to look out the window if you look at 2 minutes of ads first. Literally they are doing this on coolers already.

        • These are probably cargo vans or other, smaller delivery vehicles. For instance you could eliminate the human drivers from food delivery services by having the vehicle pull up in front of the restaurant, where x number of heated (or cooled!) lockers would open up (and a light comes on for each one to tell you which ones to use) and a [ghost] restaurant employee would put packages into them. They probably don't even have a windscreen. You could put a decal on the front that looked like one so it would give t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        I suspect that this is the case.

        But GM has effectively had this on their Cadillac line for years. Car driving down the road with the left signal eternally flashing.

        Driverless

        Again, already produced by GM. Picture the above Cadillac with nothing but wrinkly old, liver-spotted hands on the steering wheel. And perhaps the top of a bald or silver-hared head below that steering wheel. But otherwise no evidence of a driver. We have these all over my town.

    • Re:no turn signals? so other cars / ped will not k (Score:5, Funny)

      by nukenerd ( 172703 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @04:22PM (#63681033)

      no turn signals?

      BMW have a patent on that.

    • Cruise AI determined it's safer to drive without signaling. I'm sure GM has ChatGPT generated studies to prove it.

  • Will GM help some in court with an DUI in this car (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @03:47PM (#63680957)

    Will GM help some in court with an DUI in this car.
    say someone in an car with no controls has an cop stop it and the rider is taken to jail with an DUI change will GM step up and cover the attorney bills?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Will GM help some in court with an DUI in this car.
      say someone in an car with no controls has an cop stop it and the rider is taken to jail with an DUI change will GM step up and cover the attorney bills?

      Unlikely but if this is ever an issue then they might well push for a change in the law so this doesn't happen (such a change, were it ever an issue, should be a no-brainer though so probably not much advocacy needed...?)

      • Expect lots of anti-change advocacy anyway. These people are still fighting a rear guard action against the repeal of Prohibition. Anything they could do to make it difficult to drink in public places is something they are interested in.

        The obvious is not going to be so obvious here.

      • well right now at least in some states you can get an DUI for sleeping in an packed car.
        So it may be an issue as IN control can be just having the keys on you?
        So does having an app count as IN control even if that is just setting an destination and will it matter if that is an robo taxi vs an rent a car vs an owned car?
        Does the car having an E-stop button count as IN control?
        Also in an case of someone getting killed that may put the owner / renter / rider (based on how EULA's are written) into the court roo

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Seems like legally it would be more like a taxi. In fact GM may operate it as a taxi service, rather than selling you the car. A lot more profitable that way.

          Their dream is to make cars something you rent, not buy. Loans are already a huge money-maker for car manufacturers, and pay-per-ride is even better.

    • Will GM help some in court with an DUI in this car.
      say someone in an car with no controls has an cop stop it and the rider is taken to jail with an DUI change will GM step up and cover the attorney bills?

      Can a drunk passenger be charged with DUI? The idea is that no passenger is a driver, which is why a driver-less car service works for driving people home from bars.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ichijo ( 607641 )

        Can a drunk passenger be charged with DUI?

        Yes. [davidazizi...injury.com]

        • Can a drunk passenger be charged with DUI?

          Yes. [davidazizi...injury.com]

          No.

          That's not a drunk passenger being charged with a DUI.

          That's a drunk person sleeping in the passenger seat of a car with no driver, being the only occupant they're still considered to be the operator (with the potential of waking up and driving the vehicle at any moment).

          In this case it's literally impossible for them to operate the vehicle. Depending on the type of control they still have (and how the courts interpret it) it might still be DUI, but it's different from sleeping in your car while drunk.

          • Any lawyer worth their salt would demand a jury trial and win.

            While a judge might be willing to ignore the facts and go with a literal interpretation of the law, no jury would.

            One of the main advantages of the US legal system is the right to a jury of your peers. It stops the government from doing stupid crap.

            One of the main disadvantages is when the government decides you do not get a jury trial - for example immigration cases and civil asset forfeiture.

            • One of the main advantages of the US legal system is the right to a jury of your peers. It stops the government from doing stupid crap.

              No, it does not. Before the trial the judge lies to the jurors and tells them that if the law says such and such and the person did such and such, that the jury's job is to find them guilty. And they usually do. Juries cannot be held accountable for their verdicts, but the judge never ever tells them that, and if the defense brings it up in court there will definitely be a mistrial and a new trial date set. Your fantasy about juries preventing legal fuckery is hopelessly naive.

              • The reasons the judge doesn't mention it is that IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME.

                It's the main reason juries do not convict police officers. They ignore the law because they think the "criminal' deserved it. Same thing happened inthe 50s and 60s when juries let white men go for murdering black people.

                And it happens today (From this study: Black, Robert C. (1997â"1998), FIJA: Monkeywrenching the Justice System, 66 UMKC L. Rev., p. 11):

                Juries acquit about 19% of the time when judges would convict. The study cl

                • You are cynical and have falsely believed that juries are morons. They are not. They may not know the law, but they do now what justice is.

                  I drive to work five days a week, I know most people are morons. And I've been through not being selected for a jury a couple of times so I'm personally familiar with the judges' rap. I've also been solicited to join (for some reason) the San Francisco grand jury panel, while I was living in Kelseyville no less. That was weird.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ichijo ( 607641 )

            That's a drunk person sleeping in the passenger seat of a car with no driver, being the only occupant they're still considered to be the operator

            Ok so they are the operator because they are the only occupant of the vehicle.

            When a parent leaves a child in a car, does that child become the operator?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jbengt ( 874751 )
          Was the linked article written by AI? Or maybe translated from English to Japanese and back to English by drunken 8th graders?

      • kind of yes some sleeping in the passenger area can get an DUI just by having keys on them as they are IN control of the car.
        So does having an app on your phone count as IN control?
        also what about if that selfdriveing car runs over and kills someone can the IN control person in the car face hardtime?

        • I am not questioning you. Just saying that it's strange that you can be driving under the influence without driving. Next, you will get a DUI without being under the influence.

    • say someone in an car with no controls has an cop stop it and the rider is taken to jail with an DUI change will GM step up and cover the attorney bills?

      That is silly whataboutism. DUI is short for "Driving Under Influence". If you have no controls you're not driving. The passenger of a car doesn't get fined for being drunk either.

      • If you're sleeping in the car with everything turned off you aren't driving either, are you?

        • If you're sleeping in the car with everything turned off you aren't driving either, are you?

          If you're the only person in the car you are as you're the operator of the vehicle. A vehicle that isn't in motion with someone inside it still has a driver. A vehicle which flat out doesn't have the ability to be driven on the other hand is something completely different.

  • Unless i'm seriously mistaken, this seems to be extremely dangerous.

    Not because a turn signal permits any action that would be forbidden without one, but other users of the road need to know IF this car INTENDS to alter its course.

    • I'd want to see the actual petition before I decided what they are actually asking for. When you click the link that looks like it might go to the petition, it just goes to another story, because Reuters. Reuters is big, but it's not particularly competent any more. They get a lot wrong.

  • Who asked for this? Where is the need? I guess conventional car accidents were not enough.

    • The Taxi and Limousine industry made $41.7bn in 2022 in the US alone.

  • The central issue is deciding whether vehicles that are driven not by humans but by computers need to comply with safety standards that are fundamentally about human drivers

    As long as they are sharing the road with human drivers then the answer is going to be definitely yes to most of these. It might be fine for a computer to send a wireless data packet to nearby driverless cars to let them know which direction it plans to turn but any human driver nearby is going to need a flashing indicator light.

    As for onboard controls, what happens when the computer inevitably fails at some point? While having a big red stop button may be good for many machines pressing that in the mid

    • Yup, just like the big red "float to surface" button in the Oceangate Titan.

    • pedestrians need lights as well

    • As for onboard controls, what happens when the computer inevitably fails at some point?

      Same thing that happens with a normal car when that happens, it gets winched onto a rollback

      • Only after it has stopped. Mechanical failures generally result in the vehicle losing power and slowing down under some level of control from the driver. A computer driver failure can be much more dangerous since it is in control can just killing that control without the ability to take over could be just as dangerous.
  • How are they going to overcome driving outside of their mapped highways and roads?
    Wasn't this the advantage of Tesla where it can drive on any type of road?
    • These cars don't have to work in every set of conditions that a car currently does. They are for simple taxi services. As they get more road time, self driving cars will improve and be able to handle adverse weather and more difficult locations.
    • It won't. Unlike a human driver, if it encounters something not in it's 'training data' or that confuses it's idiot algorithms, it'll just pull to the side and stop, and 'phone home' so a remote HUMAN operator can take over -- and if there's no cell service where you are, then I guess you're stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way to drive the damned thing.

  • going down the road, so many people use no blinkers, sometimes you wonder if they have a steering whee when the car zooms 2 or 3 lanes left and right. could they be driving the new GM prototypes? :p

    • going down the road, so many people use no blinkers, sometimes you wonder if they have a steering whee when the car zooms 2 or 3 lanes left and right. could they be driving the new GM prototypes? :p

      Only if BMW is now a division of GM...

  • Prepare for unnecessary property damage, mayhem, and deaths.
  • ...Stick to the highway code, AI, and GM, don't take out the only failsafe against AI failures (i.e. human-usable controls). Reinvent the controls if you have to - I always wanted dual joysticks for driving - but don't remove them entirely. AI works best IMO as an accessory and enabler of human ingenuity; it should NOT be in the pilot's seat, so to speak. Not right now, anyway. Perhaps one day.

  • No windsheild wipers (Score:3)

    by Waccoon ( 1186667 ) on Wednesday July 12, 2023 @11:07PM (#63681737)
    Well, damn... why don't you just have no windows while you're at it? I guess you can't fear for your life if you can't see.
  • So, without a steering wheel, no intervening human can correct a stuck car, it can only be towed out of its predicament? Genius. [slashdot.org]

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