https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-eliminates-human-controls-requirement-fully-automated-vehicles-2022-03-11/

 
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March 11, 20221:30 PM UTCLast Updated ago

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    Autos & Transportation

U.S. eliminates human controls requirement for fully automated
vehicles

By David Shepardson

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2 minute read
An attendee takes a selfie inside a Cruise Origin autonomous vehicle
during its unveiling in San Francisco

An attendee takes a selfie inside a Cruise Origin autonomous vehicle,
a Honda and General Motors self-driving car partnership, during its
unveiling in San Francisco, California, U.S. January 21, 2020.
REUTERS/Stephen Lam

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WASHINGTON, March 10 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators on Thursday issued
final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers
to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to
meet crash standards.

Automakers and tech companies have faced significant hurdles to
deploying automated driving system (ADS) vehicles without human
controls because of safety standards written decades ago that assume
people are in control.

Last month, General Motors Co (GM.N) and its self-driving technology
unit Cruise petitioned the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration (NHTSA) for permission to build and deploy a
self-driving vehicle without human controls like steering wheels or
brake pedals.

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The rules revise regulations that assume vehicles "will always have a
driver's seat, a steering wheel and accompanying steering column, or
just one front outboard passenger seating position."

"For vehicles designed to be solely operated by an ADS, manually
operated driving controls are logically unnecessary," the agency
said.

The new rules, which were first proposed in March 2020, emphasize
automated vehicles must provide the same levels of occupant
protection as human-driven vehicles.

"As the driver changes from a person to a machine in ADS-equipped
vehicles, the need to keep the humans safe remains the same and must
be integrated from the beginning," said NHTSA Deputy Administrator
Steven Cliff.

NHTSA's rule says children should not occupy what is traditionally
known as the "driver's" position, given that the driver's seating
position has not been designed to protect children in a crash, but if
a child is in that seat, the car will not immediately be required to
cease motion.

NHTSA said existing regulations do not currently bar deploying
automated vehicles as long as they have manual driving controls, and
as it continues to consider changing other safety standards,
manufacturers may still need to petition NHTSA for an exemption to
sell their ADS-equipped vehicles.

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Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Karishma Singh

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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