Safety, Rules and the Road Ahead
How safe the cars are and how anyone would know, who regulates them in the United States, the crashes that wrote the rules, and the humans still in the loop.
How Safe Are Self-Driving Cars? What the Data Can and Cannot Say
Crash rates, disengagement reports, insurance data and the problem of comparing a robotaxi to a human: what is actually known about self-driving safety.
8 min readNHTSA, the Standing General Order and Federal Rules for Automated Vehicles
What the U.S. federal government actually regulates about self-driving cars, what it leaves to the states, and why a car without a steering wheel needs an exemption.
7 min readHow California Permits Robotaxis: The DMV and the CPUC
California's two-regulator system for autonomous vehicles: what the DMV permits, what the CPUC permits, what the disengagement reports are, and how a city like San Francisco fights back.
7 min readThe Crashes That Shaped the Rules: Tempe, Williston, San Francisco
The Uber pedestrian death in Tempe, the first fatal Tesla Autopilot crash, and the Cruise dragging incident: what happened, what the investigators found, and what changed.
9 min readRemote Assistance: The Humans Behind Driverless Cars
Every robotaxi service has a room full of people. What remote assistance does, how it differs from remote driving, and why the ratio of humans to cars matters for the business.
6 min read