Home
QR Code

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, September 24, 2018 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Timothy Lee

"Rethinking Regulation in the Era of Driverless Cars"

ABSTRACT -- Self-driving cars are on the verge of becoming shipping commercial products, not just research prototypes. In this talk I'll describe how self-driving cars are regulated today at the federal and state levels. Then I'll explain why the existing legal framework is likely to prove inadequate in a driverless world.

A key idea is that we're likely to see a shift from today's model of cars being sold outright to a future where many cars are rented out through on-demand driverless taxi services. And even cars that are sold to customers in the future are likely to require service contracts for their self-driving features for liability reasons.

Current car regulations are designed to ensure the safety of relatively simple physical systems—brakes, airbags, and so forth. But those regulations don't consider complex processes that will be crucial to ensuring the safety of driverless cars—things like replacing defective sensors, updating self-driving software, defending against hackers, and so forth.

I'll then suggest some concrete steps policymakers could take to provide more vigorous and effective oversight without needlessly slowing the development of what is likely to be a life-saving technology.

SPEAKER -- Timothy B. Lee is a senior reporter for the technology news site Ars Technica, where he covers technology policy and the future of transportation. Before Ars Technica, he was a reporter at the Washington Post and Vox. He has covered the self-driving car industry thoroughly over the last two years, writing in-depth pieces about lidar and machine learning technologies, the business strategies of self-driving car companies, recent crashes, and the legal and regulatory issues raised by self-driving technology. He holds a bachelors degree in computer science from the University of Minnesota and a master's degree in computer science from Princeton University.

Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov