'At first I was a little nervous getting in,' said Rep. Bill Shuster. | Courtesy Look, chairman — no hands!

House committee leaders usually have a driver on staff to shuttle them between Hill votes, fundraisers and speeches, but Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Bill Shuster let the technology take the wheel Wednesday.

After a 30-mile ride in a driverless car developed by General Motors and Carnegie Mellon University, the Pennsylvania Republican said the experience — his first in an autonomous vehicle — was “incredible.”


“I’ve got to tell you: At first, I was a little nervous getting in,” Shuster said after the ride between a Pittsburgh suburb and the city’s airport. But Shuster said he “very quickly became very comfortable and confident that the technology in the car could perform.”

The car — an outfitted 2011 Cadillac SRX — maneuvered through four-lane roads that were “fairly heavily congested,” Shuster said. It went through “smart” traffic lights that sense when a car is approaching, then onto Interstate 79, where it slowed for a construction zone and passed more sluggish cars while still obeying the speed limit.

An engineer on the project sat behind the wheel in case of trouble, but Shuster said the person touched the steering wheel, accelerator or brakes for only a few “minor tweaks.” Shuster added that “for all intents and purposes, it was completely autonomous.”

Driverless cars — which use cameras, radar, computers and other technology to automatically steer, accelerate and brake a vehicle without human interaction — are a potential game-changer for a transportation world that’s seen few major advances in recent decades.

“It’s the future of transportation and it’s here,” Shuster said.

The technology has come a long way in a few years. The chairman recalled seeing an autonomous vehicle in 2007 that was so “packed” with equipment that “you couldn’t get anyone in it” — even though it was a spacious SUV.

“Today, we had four passengers comfortably. … It was a car that can be used by everyday Americans,” Shuster said.

The new technology brings safety, quality of life and other benefits, advocates say — but also raises concerns for policymakers tasked with ensuring a safe, efficient and effective road network.

Shuster acknowledges the policy problems. “We have to start to figure out how to embrace this technology because it’s coming,” he said.

Shuster — who often drives between Washington, D.C., and his southwestern Pennsylvania district — pointed to his home state, where PennDOT has partnered with Carnegie Mellon to look at how roads could change with the popularization of autonomous cars.

“Because autonomous vehicles will be able to travel more closely together, maybe six-lane roads with 14-foot-wide lanes and 30-foot medians are no longer needed,” PennDOT Secretary Barry Schoch, who was on the ride with Shuster, told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review earlier this year.

Accidents also pose another problem for lawmakers: Who’s to blame when the first driverless car plows into a vehicle and kills several people? “There’s things like that that have to be dealt with,” Shuster said.

Shuster’s committee faces a 2014 deadline for a major surface transportation bill that would be the place to address any lingering issues over driverless car technology, though it remains to be seen how extensive any such language would be.