Feds to Self-Driving Car Makers: Regulate Yourself

Human error is to blame for 94 percent of all fatal motor vehicle crashes, and the rates of death have been spiking: About 40,000 people were killed on U.S. highways in 2016. That’s one reason the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hope to get more self-driving vehicles on the road, and fast.

But autonomous vehicles (AVs) could be a threat to both operators and others, too, if they turn out to be glitch-ridden machines. (That’s assuming they don’t achieve robot overlord status and actively seek to kill us.) Just this week, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that insufficient system controls contributed to the fatal accident of a man using Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot feature in 2015.