Car Companies Failed at Regulating Themselves. Why Would Autonomous Car Companies Be Different?

The auto industry has fought sensible safety standards for decades, opposing requirements for safety glass, seat belts, airbags, and catalytic converters. Volkswagen committed a massive global fraud by falsifying tests of the emissions from its diesel cars. The auto industry is at it again, working Scott Pruitt at EPA to roll back Obama-era clean car standards. We can’t trust the industry to self-regulate.

Especially since setting proper safety standards for autonomous vehicles is a hard problem to solve. For all the mayhem on our highways, human drivers now drive close to 100 million miles on average before a fatality occurs. The self-driving car industry has logged around 15 million miles of test rides on public roads and has now inflicted its first casualty while testing. Based on these numbers alone, there is a 16 percent chance that the entire self-driving fleet as tested is just as safe as human drivers and simply got unlucky with an early fatality. There’s a better than 4 out of 5 chance, if the technology’s capabilities are uniform across companies, that it is less safe than human drivers. Companies like Waymo have already argued that their technology works better than Uber’s but haven’t given us any way to prove it.

Each company developing self-driving cars would have to log billions of miles of training rides before they could prove statistically that they are substantially safer than humans. Analysts at Rand have shown that too strict a standard for proving safety performance could substantially delay deployment and cost more lives than a less strict standard that allowed the technology to deploy sooner.

The task of weighing potential benefits and costs over time in the face of uncertainty belongs with the public sector, not the companies racing to develop the technology. Despite the promise of breakthrough drugs, for example, we don’t allow pharmaceutical companies to use their own testing procedures and market a new product whenever they say it is ready. Instead, we require them to prove safety and efficacy to the Food and Drug Administration, through a multi-tiered approval process.