Monday, September 30, 2013

"Driverless Carts Are Coming Sooner Than Driverless Cars"

Bryant Walker Smith, guest-blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy:
I’m delighted to be spending this week committing overt acts in furtherance of the Volokh Conspiracy. Since joining Stanford in 2011, I’ve been studying the increasing automation, connectivity, and capability that promise to dramatically change our lives, institutions, and laws. My posts this week will focus on one key example: self-driving vehicles (or whatever you want to call them). The timing is fortuitous, since any remaining legal or technical issues that we fail to collectively solve in the comments section of this blog can be remedied at next week’s U.S. House hearing on “How Autonomous Vehicles Will Shape the Future of Surface Transportation.”

A number of other government bodies are already shaping the legal future of autonomous driving. Nevada, Florida, California, and the District of Columbia have enacted laws expressly regulating these vehicles, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles is currently developing more detailed rules, and a number of other states have considered bills. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a preliminary policy statement earlier this year, and Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the European Union have also taken initial domestic steps. Meanwhile, parties to the 1949 Geneva and 1968 Vienna Conventions on Road Traffic are discussing how to reconcile language in these treaties with advanced driver assistance systems....MUCH MORE
Here's the writer's Stanford Law School page:
Bryant Walker Smith is a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a fellow at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS), and a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School who writes, speaks, and teaches on the legal and policy aspects of increasing automation. He is a member of the New York Bar and a former transportation engineer who has worked on infrastructure issues in the United States and throughout Europe. Bryant also chairs the Emerging Technology Law Committee of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies and the planning task force for SAE International's On-Road Automated Vehicle Standards Committee...
He used to have a blog but I can't find it in the bookmarks.