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Leith Cars Blog

Not a Secret: Government Approves Google’s Driverless Car

If there were a reliable car that could chauffeur you completely on its own, would you take it?

Automakers and Silicon Valley tech companies are working on that very thing, and this week they revealed that the federal government gave them a very encouraging decision.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is the federal agency responsible for giving direction to automakers about what they legally can and cannot do. This agency, the NHTSA, posted this week a letter it sent to Google last week that described how it saw the future of self-driving cars unfolding.

Most notably, the NHTSA’s letter showed that it is thinking about cars and drivers in a very forward thinking direction:

“We agree with Google its (self-driving car) will not have a ‘driver’ in the traditional sense that vehicles have had drivers during the last more than one hundred years. … NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants.”

That means that the driver, as far as the NHTSA is concerned, could be a computer system and not the person behind the wheel. For the federal government to talk about self-driving cars with such comfort shows that we’re on the cusp of a new age in cars.

Which brings us back to our original question: if the main things you value in a car are 1) reliability, and 2) it’s ability to do the mundane aspects of driving, would you be okay with a reliable car that completely handles driving for you?

Certainly there are other questions that need to be worked out, such as whether a human could take control of the vehicle and whether a person needs to babysit the computer. These are questions that automakers, Silicon Valley, and the NHTSA will be discussing over the next few years as they develop the technology.

The important thing, however, is that they’re asking these questions and listening to one another, so we’re glad to see that conversation happening. Onward!