A new advocacy group is pushing state lawmakers to pass more stringent autonomous vehicle regulations. The group, Safe Autonomous Vehicles Everywhere in the United States (SAVE-US), says its goal is to ensure that new self-driving technology will save lives instead of doing harm. Its work has a clear target: Tesla.
The campaign, announced on Wednesday, counts among its goals passing legislation that would require tech developers to be clearer about the limits of their driving technology; report more specific and public crash information to states; and use multiple sensors on their vehicles. In the US, regulations governing autonomous vehicles are generally handled by the states, whose laws range from stringent (California) to relatively permissive (Arizona, Texas). Fourteen US states don’t have autonomous-vehicle-related laws at all. The group will initially target lawmakers in large states, including Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, says Shua Sanchez, the group’s national campaign director.
Sanchez and Bob Somers, SAVE-US’s technical adviser, met this summer outside an administrative hearing in Oakland, California. Inside, attorneys for California’s Department of Motor Vehicles argued that Tesla should temporarily lose its license to manufacture and sell vehicles in the state because, they alleged, the electric automaker had falsely advertised its Full Self-Driving and Autopilot driver assistance features.
Sanchez, a physicist, had been following Tesla closely since he got involved in the Tesla Takedown movement earlier this year, leading demonstrations outside of a showroom in Boston to protest CEO Elon Musk’s involvement with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Somers had worked as an engineer at the self-driving vehicle developer Zoox for half a decade. (He’s since left the autonomous vehicle industry.)
In Oakland, they agreed: Autonomous vehicle technology has the potential to save lives. But rushing the technology, or confusing customers about its limits, is unsafe and could doom the whole project. (An administrative judge is due to decide on the Tesla case later this year.)
“It’s fair to say that Tesla is the worst actor in this space, but that definitely doesn’t mean every other company is a perfect actor either,” says Sanchez. “If we don’t have good regulations in place, we leave the door open for any company to pursue an unsafe path.”
Unlike many of its competitors, which use pricier radars and lidars plus cameras, Tesla depends on vision-only software, arguing that more effective cameras and AI-trained software alone can safely pilot its vehicles. The tech strategy is at the center of one of Tesla’s chief promises: That one day, the cars it has already manufactured will be able to completely drive themselves thanks to a quick software update. Competitors, including Waymo and Zoox, use more expensive and purpose-built robotaxis to pull off their autonomous rides. Last week, the US federal government said it had opened an investigation of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance software following reports that the feature, which is not autonomous and must be supervised by a driver behind the wheel, ran red lights and drove on the wrong side of the street.
