White House will publish footsteps for auto-makers interested in making self-driving vehicles and model legislation for states that want to legalize them

The White House will release guidelines for self-driving automobiles on Tuesday, as well as model legislation recommended to states that want to follow in the footsteps of California, Florida and Nevada, which have legalized automated vehicles.



The US Department of Transportation (DoT) will publish a new document containing “vehicle performance guidance for manufacturers, developers, and other organizations”, including a 15-point safety assessment automakers are being asked to sign and submit to the DoT.



The national highway safety and traffic administration (NHTSA) will also solicit public opinion about whether or not it should approve new self-driving models before they are allowed on the market.

In March, car manufacturers told Congress they believed their own internal standards were good enough to warrant approval. But in June, the question of safety in automated driving systems became far more urgent when a Tesla owner, Joshua Brown, died when his car’s autopilot sensors failed to detect a large tractor trailer against a bright sky.

'Someone is going to die': experts warn lawmakers over self-driving cars Read more

The rules will define where self-driving cars can operate, how quickly they must react to failure, how they should perform after crashes and, though the rules mandate privacy protections, how system data should be recorded for “information sharing, knowledge building and for crash reconstruction purposes”. The guidelines outline validation and verification methods for automated driving systems.

Perhaps most significantly, there will also be ethical laws set out for roadway dilemmas.

Legislators warned automakers at the 15 March Senate hearing that the governing body took a dim view of the industry’s ability to self-regulate. “Someone is going to die in this technology,” Duke University roboticist Missy Cummings told the US Senate during a tense hearing where she testified alongside representatives from General Motors and Delphi Automotive, among others.

Senators Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal, who questioned car executives at the hearing, had cosponsored a 2015 bill to regulate self-driving automobiles. The bill was referred to committee and never returned to the floor.

The guidelines also address cybersecurity concerns: one major impetus for the Markey/Blumenthal bill was the demonstrated ability of hackers to break into and take control of car models currently on the market. The DoT will be releasing a set of best practices to the automotive industry for improving vehicle cybersecurity. These best practices, which complement important cybersecurity elements in the policy being released on Tuesday, will apply to all vehicles regardless of their level of automation.

Six months ago, Markey was blunt with car manufacturers who complained about red tape: “We don’t pass murder statutes for our mothers,” he said. “We do it for all the people who might commit murders.”