Dive Brief:
- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened separate investigations into the behavior of Waymo and Zoox’s autonomous vehicles.
- The agency’s Office of Defects Investigation has received 22 reports about Waymo vehicles involving collisions with stationary and semi-stationary objects such as gates and chains, collisions with parked vehicles and instances where the company’s automated driving system appeared to disobey traffic safety control devices.
- Meanwhile, ODI is investigating two incidents involving Zoox vehicles equipped with its ADS that “unexpectedly braked suddenly,” leading to rear-end collisions. In each incident, a motorcyclist that was following a Zoox vehicle collided into it, resulting in minor injuries.
Dive Insight:
Robotaxis and autonomous vehicles have faced heightened scrutiny after a General Motors’ Cruise unit struck and seriously injured a pedestrian in San Francisco last October.
Last month, the NHTSA launched investigations into Ford and Tesla over the safety of their self-driving systems. The probe of Ford’s BlueCruise hands-free highway driving feature follows two incidents in which a Mustang Mach-E collided with a stationary vehicle. For Tesla, the investigation is assessing whether the automaker’s response to a 2 million-vehicle recall in December was sufficient enough to address concerns that drivers could misuse its automated driving feature.
Alphabet-owned Waymo updated its software earlier this year after two of its ride-hailing vehicles struck a pickup truck being towed in Phoenix in December, leading to a separate NHTSA investigation. NHTSA ultimately issued a recall for the estimated 444 units impacted in February, noting affected vehicles were repaired Jan. 12.
NHTSA’s probe into Amazon subsidiary Zoox will evaluate its ADS performance, particularly relating to the motorcycle collisions, the behavior in crosswalks around vulnerable road users and in other similar rear-end collision scenarios.
In an interview with CNBC last week, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said the standard for autonomous vehicles technology should not only be “as good as a human driver,” but “much, much better.” The secretary added that said “it seems like the public would be more accepting of more deaths and injuries caused by people than caused, so to speak, by machines.”
“I do think, a hundred years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised if people are scratching their heads that untrained human beings were driving cars at all,” Buttigieg said. “But we’ve got to get from here to there.”
