Federal regulators are clearing the way for robotaxis to operate without steering wheels or eventually even brake pedals as the rules start to catch up to the evolving technology.
Amazon's fully autonomous Zoox vehicles got approval Thursday to begin charging customers for rides in the specially designed boxy cars that feature four inward-facing seats once they secure state and local approval. Zoox has already been offering free rides in Las Vegas and San Francisco since last year.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration also proposed a rule last month to allow robotaxis to operate without brake pedals, but that proposal is still pending. Administrator Jonathan Morrison said his agency wants to update the regulations to fit these fully autonomous vehicles while still acting as the “cop on the beat to make sure that this is being done right.”
Most vehicle safety regulations were written decades ago, always with the assumption that there would be a human driver behind the wheel. But Morrison said that things like steering wheels, windshield wipers and side-view mirrors aren't really needed in an autonomous vehicle.
“If you’re going to be developing a standard in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, nobody at that time had this imagination, nobody had a crystal ball that you might have technologies that would enable the vehicle to drive itself,” Morrison said.
Questions remain about robotaxi safety
The Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety group raised concerns about Zoox’s plan to operate without a steering wheel or other standard controls because the company didn’t provide detailed evidence to show that its vehicles could operate safely on public roads.
“Lots of promises, lots of glossy language, lots of ‘We believe, we think we’ll do this.’ Yet there really was no data behind the promises, and that’s really concerning to us,” said Peter Kurdock, who is general counsel for the Advocates group.
Morrison said this technology does offer the promise of never driving distracted or drunk like human drivers do, but robotaxis have had some problems. Sometimes they're just weird behaviors like stopping in the middle of the road or struggling to get out of a parking lot. But he said NHTSA responded to the incidents of autonomous cars passing school buses or interfering with first responders, with investigations, recalls and calls to action.
“Sometimes we have seen unsafe behaviors, and we jump on that really quickly again. That’s our job at NHTSA,” Morrison said. But he said Americans shouldn't be terribly worried about the safety of these robotaxis.
“By and large we’re really excited about the promise of this technology and we want to see that promise fulfilled,” he said.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety said recently that the limited crash data the government requires autonomous vehicle companies to submit makes it hard to assess the safety record of these robotaxis as they continue to expand across the country.
Most companies don't report how many miles their autonomous vehicles drove, which makes it impossible to calculate a crash rate, according to the IIHS. And there isn't a clear standard for which incidents must be reported. So autonomous vehicle companies are reporting many more minor incidents that human drivers who tend to only report a crash when there is significant damage or injuries.
Robotaxi industry is expanding quickly nationwide
Zoox and Tesla are working to catch up to the industry-leading Waymo that already operates in multiple cities. Waymo is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.
Zoox CEO Aicha Evans said this approval is an important milestone for autonomous vehicles.
“This achievement reflects a shared commitment to enabling innovation while maintaining the highest standards of safety,” Evans said.
Amazon hopes to eventually produce as many as 10,000 robotaxis a year at a plant near Silicon Valley as it works to challenge Waymo. Amazon paid $1.2 billion to acquire self-driving startup Zoox. Initially, Zoox will only be allowed to deploy up to 2,500 vehicles without steering wheels over the next two years as it works to prove the technology is safe. The company said that more than half a million people have already ridden in its vehicles.