Lawmaker targets Uber’s self-driving vehicles in new legislation 

Good morning! TGIF. One lesson for the day: If you want to do something in the state, don’t try to get around the permitting process. 

It’s not enough that Uber killed its unpermitted, self-driving-vehicle pilot program in San Francisco just a week after it started; an assemblyman wants to squash any further attempts to test vehicles without a permit as well. 

Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, introduced legislation requiring the DMV to revoke registrations for self-driving vehicles in violation of the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program. The bill is a response to Uber, which last year began testing its vehicles without a permit, even picking up passengers, violating state regulations. And one of the vehicles ran a red light. 

Under Ting’s bill, law enforcement would have the authority to impound violating vehicles and the DMV could fine as much as $25,000 per vehicle per day. 

“I applaud our innovation economy and all the companies developing autonomous vehicle technology, but no community should face what we did in San Francisco,” Ting said in a statement. “The pursuit of innovation does not include a license to put innocent lives at risk.”

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “The Coastal Commission’s stated concern that a proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant’s intake pipes pose a threat to small and microscopic plankton has been rebutted in a letter from three prominent California marine biologists.” CalWatchdog has more. 

• “Consumer Watchdog collects millions, but does it lower your insurance rates?” The Sacramento Bee has the story. 

• “Jerry Brown doesn’t want to give doctors a cut of the new tobacco tax money,” writes The Sacramento Bee. 

• “Days after Governor Jerry Brown called for an extension of California’s signature greenhouse gas reduction program and threatened to withhold money it generates until that happens, Assembly Democrats introduced legislation.” Capital Public Radio has more. 

Legislature:

• Assembly is in at 9 a.m. to vote on the appointment of Xavier Becerra as state attorney general.

Gov. Brown: 

• No public events announced. 

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Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, introduced legislation requiring the DMV to revoke registrations for self-driving vehicles in violation of the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program. The bill is a response to Uber, which last year began testing its vehicles without a permit, even picking up passengers, violating state regulations. And one of the vehicles ran a red light. 

Under Ting’s bill, law enforcement would have the authority to impound violating vehicles and the DMV could fine as much as $25,000 per vehicle per day. 

“I applaud our innovation economy and all the companies developing autonomous vehicle technology, but no community should face what we did in San Francisco,” Ting said in a statement. “The pursuit of innovation does not include a license to put innocent lives at risk.”

Permits

Twenty companies have 130 test vehicles on the road under permits, which cost $150 each. To get permitted, vehicles must be registered and insured. Documentation both certifying the vehicle is for testing only and describing the technology must be provided as well.  

Last year, Uber refused to get permits before debuting its pilot program. The DMV revoked the cars’ registrations and offered to expedite permits, but Uber packed up its driver-less car program and moved to Arizona instead. 

“We have stopped our self-driving pilot in California, but remain 100 percent committed to our home state and will be redoubling our efforts to develop workable statewide rules,” an Uber spokesperson told CalWatchdog. “Our cars recently departed for Arizona by truck. We’re excited to have the support of Governor (Doug) Ducey.”

Uber’s defiance of a California Department of Motor Vehicles’ demand that the pioneering transit company stop testing its self-driving Volvo sport-utility vehicles in San Francisco ended Wednesday when the DMV revoked the vehicles’ registrations, making them illegal to operate on state roads.

The DMV first ordered the Uber tests to end in a Dec. 14 letter. But Uber — which is headquartered in San Francisco — defied the letter and argued that its tests weren’t subject to rules the DMV issued in October. It said those rules were meant to govern testing of fully autonomous vehicles.

Instead, Uber said it was using vehicles with self-driving technology akin to the in-dashboard tech seen in some Tesla models, and that humans were in the vehicles. A human tester’s failure was blamed for the incident last week when an Uber test Volvo was caught on video running a red light in San Francisco.

The company based its claim that the DMV didn’t understand its own rules on language that defined an autonomous vehicle subject to state regulations which said these vehicles did not require “the active physical control or monitoring” of a person. “We can’t in good conscience” accept a bureaucratic sanction based on ignorance, a Google official told reporters in a conference call last Friday.

It’s not clear whether Uber will face further sanctions from the DMV or the state Attorney General’s Office. But the company’s history of slowness or outright refusal to comply with regulatory agencies may work against it, both in decisions made by state officials and in the court of public opinion. Also damaging was Uber officials’ quick concession after complaints from San Francisco bicycle riders that its test vehicles needed better programming in dealing with bicycle lanes that are ubiquitous in the Bay Area.

Obama administration pushed much laxer regulation

The Uber-DMV dispute underlined how different California’s approach to driverless-vehicle regulation is from the federal government. In September, the Obama administration issued recommendations — not hard rules — for regulations of self-driving vehicles. It called for there to be a uniform policy in all states to promote innovation and experimentation with a technology that many hope will reduce pollution and congestion and end up being a trillion-dollar industry.

Four weeks later, the California DMV issued rules that said autonomous vehicle testing could only be done by companies whose testing programs were designed to “constantly ensure the technologies comply with local laws [in California’s] 58 counties and 482 incorporated cities,” according to the San Jose Mercury-News. The DMV rules required that formal permission for testing be granted by any local government whose roads would be part of tests.

As CalWatchdog reported, the California approach to regulating self-driving cars produced sharp blowback from automakers and tech giants.

Uber’s problems in San Francisco have prompted sympathy and perhaps opportunism from new Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. The Associated Press reported that Steinberg invited Uber to shift its testing to Sacramento if it wanted friendlier treatment. “We want Sacramento to be the hotbed for companies seeking to develop driverless car technology,” he told the wire service.

New proposed rules unveiled this month by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles drew sharp complaints from the leading companies in the field — Google, General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and Honda — as being far too onerous and certain to slow innovation. They are among 18 firms with licenses to test autonomous vehicles in California.

A nascent industry group — The Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, whose members include Lyft, Uber Technologies and Volvo — released a statement that the rules “could greatly delay the benefits that self-driving vehicles can bring to safety and mobility for individuals.”

Among the proposed state rules spurring concern:

• A regulation that would require a one-year delay between testing a vehicle with new technology and its use on public streets and highways.

• A regulation that would require driverless vehicles being tested to have vehicle data recorders whose information is regularly provided to the DMV, which automakers fear could lead to proprietary information leaking out.

• A regulation that allows police to demand that information from the vehicle data recorders be turned over within 24 hours without authorities having to get a subpoena or warrant.

• A requirement that all local governments give their permission before an autonomous vehicle could be used on their roads and highways.

The last requirement drew a sharp response from Ron Medford, the director of safety for Google’s self-driving car project, who wondered why bureaucrats didn’t grasp how much red tape this would create. Medford said the rule was “unworkable,” according to a Reuters report.

Perhaps the only state action that was greeted warmly was regulatory language that suggested the DMV would be willing to accept testing of vehicles without steering wheels more quickly than expected.

Sharp contrast between state, federal approach

The state’s framework is based in many ways on ideas outlined in a federal proposal unveiled in September. That proposal generally won praise from autonomous automakers and from such tech websites as Ars Technica for heeding industry recommendations — especially in how to categorize levels of autonomy in vehicles being developed. Instead of using outdated language crafted by federal officials, the U.S. Department of Transportation adopted what are known as the SAE standards, which classify vehicles from 0 (totally human controlled) to 5 (totally automated).

But the reason the federal proposal won cheers while the California DMV’s plan won jeers is that the federal proposal amounts to a collection of guidelines, not hard rules. The Obama administration also underlined how important it considered autonomous vehicles to be in our future economy by having Jeffrey Zients, director of the National Economic Council, join Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx at the news conference unveiling the rules. This was reflected in the headline on The New York Times coverage of the event: “Self-Driving Cars Gain Powerful Ally: The Government.”

The California state government sought to offer reassurance that its rules were drafts open to revision and that it wanted and welcomed input from the 18 companies testing autonomous vehicles in the state.

But the assurance didn’t come from Gov. Jerry Brown or one of his top aides. It came from Brian Soublet, deputy director of the California DMV, who said, “The goal is making sure that we can get this life-saving technology out on the streets.’

A new government-run retirement program: On Thursday, Gov. Brown signed Senate Bill 1234, which gives legislative approval to the state’s continuing efforts to create a new government-run retirement program for private-sector employees. Once it is up and running, private employers (with five or more employees) will be required to offer this program, whereby 3 percent of each employees’ earnings will be deducted and invested by a state-selected investment group – possibly, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS).

Employees can opt out. The details are not yet certain, but the goal is to invest the money in a low-risk investment tied to the Treasury bond. Supporters say the law protects taxpayers from incurring more than minimal costs, but critics insist the program could grow and change in ensuing years – and that there’s no way of creating a massive new government program without imposing risks on the state budget.

The idea, which is being pitched in other states too, grew out of union activism. Several years ago, when publicity over unfunded public-pension liabilities began creating pressure for pension reform, union allies wanted to come up with a “positive” rebuttal to all those news stories about six-figure pensions and pension-spiking gimmicks. This idea is designed help private workers.

Putting limits on ‘policing for profit’: One of the most controversial policing strategies in recent years has been “civil asset forfeiture.” Born out of the nation’s drug war in the 1980s, forfeiture was designed to help police agencies crack down on drug kingpins by allowing departments to grab the cash, cars and properties gained through their illegal activities. But like many government programs, asset forfeiture morphed into something its creators never envisioned.

Two of the men who helped create the program in the U.S. Department of Justice, John Yoder and Brad Cates, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2014 pointing to the corruption engendered by this process: “Law enforcement agents and prosecutors began using seized cash and property to fund their operations, supplanting general tax revenue, and this led to the most extreme abuses: law enforcement efforts based upon what cash and property they could seize to fund themselves, rather than on an even-handed effort to enforce the law.”

Basically, police agencies came to depend on the revenue and they distorted their law-enforcement priorities based on the chance to grab more cash. There’s no due process here, given that police agencies file suit against the property itself, alleging it was involved in a drug crime. No conviction is necessary. California had previously passed reforms that mostly required a conviction, but police agencies got around that by partnering with the feds (and operating under looser federal standards) and then splitting the seized property.

Senate Bill 443 was killed last year after lobbying efforts by police chiefs and other law-enforcement agencies. But a fairly recent amendment – allowing cops to still take large amounts of cash without a conviction, but limiting smaller amounts of cash and property takings – eliminated most opposition from law enforcement. The new law is meaningful, and one of the more substantive compromises to take place in Sacramento this year.

Giving the terminally ill the right to try: One of the more significant “freedom” battles this year was over the so-called “right to try” – i.e., the ability of terminally ill patients to try experimental drug treatments that have yet to gain final approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Similar measures have been approved by 31 other states.

The Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix-based free-market think tank, has been championing these measures across the country. As Goldwater explains: “The FDA … often stands between the patients and the treatments that may alleviate their symptoms or provide a cure. To access these treatments, patients must either go through a lengthy FDA exemption process or wait for the treatments to receive FDA approval, which can take a decade or more and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The California law, Assembly Bill 1668, passed overwhelmingly. According to the official bill analysis, it authorizes drug manufacturers to make investigational treatment available “to a patient with a serious or immediately life-threatening disease, when that patient has considered all other treatment options currently approved by the FDA, has been unable to participate in a relevant clinical trial, and for whom the investigational drug has been recommended by the patient’s primary physician and a consulting physician.”

Allowing felons to vote: One of the more controversial new laws, Assembly Bill 2466 by Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, allows felons who are serving their sentence in county jails to vote. The measure was opposed by law-enforcement groups, but Weber argued it would stop discrimination in voting and make it less likely that prisoners would commit new offenses.

“Civic participation can be a critical component of re-entry and has been linked to reduced recidivism,” Weber said, according to a Los Angeles Times report. “For me, this bill is not about second chances, but about maintaining the integrity of elections,” said Sen. Pat Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, in a statement. “Close elections, especially at the local level, could now turn on a handful of ballots cast by people in jail. This new law is bad for democracy and will further erode trust in government.”

Putting self-driving cars on the road: Autonomous vehicle technology has been advancing rapidly, and California is, not surprisingly, ground zero for the development of this important new technology. Gov. Brown signed a bill Thursday “that for the first time allows testing on public roads of self-driving vehicles with no steering wheels, brake pedals or accelerators,” according to a San Jose Mercury News article. “A human driver as backup is not required, but the vehicles will be limited to speeds of less than 35 mph.”

Assembly Bill 1592 itself is rather modest. It provides two spots for such testing – in a San Ramon business park and at the former Concord Naval Weapons Station. And Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released new regulations that are far friendlier toward self-driving cars than the DMV’s previous regulations. So while the new law itself isn’t particularly significant, the state’s new legislative and regulatory approach certainly is. If that approach continues, we’ll be seeing rapid expansion of autonomous vehicles here.

Greenlighting granny flats: The governor’s signing of Senate Bill 1069 shows increasing bipartisan understanding of the state’s skyrocketing home prices. The bill would relax standards for creating ADUs (accessory dwelling units), better known as granny flats.

“Eliminating barriers to ADU construction is a common-sense, cost-effective approach that will permit homeowners to share empty rooms in their homes and property, add incomes to meet family budgets, and make good use of the property in the Bay Area and across California while easing the housing crisis,” according to the bill analysis’ summary of the author’s arguments. The bill embraces a regulatory approach that could be tried with other types of housing.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. He is based in Sacramento. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

The draft regulations, issued last week, “would mandate that autonomous vehicles be operated by a licensed driver who could take over if necessary. That driver would also be on the hook for traffic violations,” as the New York Times reported.

Automakers, meanwhile, faced a litany of potentially cumbersome requirements. “The manufacturers of self-driving cars would have to subject their vehicles to a third-party safety test. And they would apply for three-year permits that would allow them to lease but not sell self-driving cars to the public,” the paper noted. “Manufacturers would also have to regularly report accidents, come up with security measures to prevent hackers from taking over cars, and tell passengers what kind of data, beyond whatever information is needed to safely run the car, the companies are collecting about them.”

Broad challenges

From both the public and private sector, criticism has been swift. The DMV’s “incomplete rules came more than 11 months after the department’s deadline,” as the Los Angeles Times observed. “Google said Wednesday that it was ‘gravely disappointed,’ and that the aim of its program is to improve safety on roads,” the Times added, while Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom “warned last week that the rules might be too onerous and block innovation.”

 “Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Transportation, which declined to comment on California’s rules, has focused most of its efforts on a narrow slice of robotic safety. It is addressing communication signals between autonomous vehicles, but not the broader question of determining if these robot cars will be safe.”

Beltway observers hoped to land objections to the California regulations that might reverberate at the federal level in the future. “As currently constructed, these proposed rules work at cross-purposes with operator and passenger safety and with the state’s desire to ensure a livable planet in the future,” wrote R Street’s Ian Adams in a Sacramento Bee op-ed. “But given some thoughtful modifications, they could present a real opportunity for California to lead the world into its next era of transportation.”

Some tech watchers have claimed that the DMV’s proposed rules would actually create greater driver risk in their push for safety. Earlier this year, in remarks at the influential SXSW conference, Google’s Astro Teller had cast doubt on the idea that human drivers would increase protections inside self-driving cars. “Even though people had sworn up and down ‘I’m going to pay so much attention,’ people do really stupid stuff when they’re driving,” he said, according to Forbes. “The assumption that humans could be a reliable back up for the system was a total fallacy!”

Forging ahead

Nevertheless, new-entrant car companies like Google, as well as traditional automakers, have determined to forge ahead with self-driving and driverless projects. Ford has been heavily rumored to have struck a collaborative partnership with Google, with an announcement expected in January. “In September, Google hired former Ford and Hyundai executive John Krafcik as CEO of Google’s Self-Driving Car Project,” the Chicago Tribune noted, while former Ford CEO Alan Mulally sits on Google’s board of directors. “Google parent Alphabet is planning to make the project its own unit to compete in the car-sharing business,” the Tribute reported.

This month, Ford joined the ranks of self-driving contenders signed up with California’s mandated Autonomous Vehicle Testing Program. “Manufacturers working on autonomous driving vehicles in California that want to test these vehicles on the streets need to enroll,” as Silicon Angle noted — a requirement that has so far drawn compliance from a litany of big names. “Volkswagen Group of America, Mercedes-Benz, Google, Delphi Automotive, Tesla Motors, Bosch, Nissan, Cruise Automation, BMW and Honda” have all signed up, according to the site.

A central contribution of this paper is to document employment opportunities created in entirely new industries – that appeared for the first time between 2000 and 2010 – associated with the arrival of new technologies.

 

These data are used to examine the determinants of new industry creation, showing that new industries are more likely to emerge in human capital abundant places and cities that specialize in industries that demand similar skills.

 

Yet, the magnitude of workers shifting into new industries is strikingly small: in 2010, only 0.5 percent of the U.S. labour force is employed in industries that did not exist in 2000.

 

Crucially, it is found that many new industries of the 2000s stem from the digital revolution, including online auctions, internet news publishers, social networking services and the video and audio streaming industry. Relative to major corporations of the early computer revolution, the companies leading the digital revolution have created few employment opportunities: while IBM and Dell still employed 431,212 and 108,800 workers respectively, Facebook’s headcount reached only 7,185 in 2013.

 

Because digital businesses require only limited capital investment, employment opportunities created by technological change may continue to stagnate as the U.S. economy is becoming increasingly digitized.

Uber an exception to grim picture — for now

But there is a California company that is an exception to the scenario outlined by Berger and Frey. It’s San Francisco-based Uber. Earlier this month, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick used a posting on his company’s web site to trumpet its claim to have created 1 million jobs around the world in 2015.

That trend isn’t necessarily likely to last, however. Uber, Google and other tech firms in California are leading the push to create self-driving cars.

This is from a September report on TechCrunch.

Uber poached around 50 scientists working on self-driving car technology at Carnegie Mellon University’s National Robotics Engineering Center earlier this year. Uber had been partnering with CMU to research building its own autonomous vehicles. But then it pulled from a massive venture funding war chest to hire away a lot of CMU’s talent for its Uber Advanced Technologies Center.

 

Now, Uber appears to be publicly trying to win back the good graces of the academic community by announcing a $5.5 million gift to CMU. The money will support hiring a new robotics faculty chair and three fellowships.

Google was also in the news on this front this month, ripping the California Department of Motor Vehicles for its proposed rules on self-driving cars.

Photo credit: telematicswire.net

Slowly but surely, driverless — or “self-driving” — cars will make their way onto California streets.

Despite a string of setbacks, and a wave of pervasive fear that automated cars could be hacked, Golden State regulators have determined to move ahead with first-in-the-nation guidelines setting the rules of the road for the ultimate gadgets.

“The state of California hopes to release the world’s first safety regulations for the public use of self-driving cars by the end of the year, officials from the Department of Motor Vehicles said Wednesday,” according to the Sacramento Business Journal. “This is the first timeline officials have offered for the release of safety regulations to govern consumer use of self-driving cars since the agency missed a statutory deadline in January. In 2012, Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation giving the DMV until the beginning of this year to issue a draft.”

A race against industry

State officials have broadly agreed on the wisdom of moving to catch up with the automotive future. But liability issues have led to disagreements between the public and private sector over what internal information driverless automakers ought to be compelled to share. “Regulators don’t want to be blamed for unnecessarily stalling the arrival of robo-chauffeurs that can see farther, react faster and don’t text, speed or fall asleep,” CBS News noted. “They’ve implored Google and traditional automakers also developing the technology to share safety data, but companies in competition don’t willingly reveal trade secrets.”

The delays threatened to stymie the industry race to field robocars, which has attracted heavy investment and fierce competition among not only the world’s leading automakers but among the tech companies pushing into the transportation market as well. “Back in May of 2014 it sure seemed that DMV experts were working hard to meet the Legislature’s December 31, 2014 deadline,” IEEE Spectrum observed. “They held public hearings, consulted with industry leaders, such as Google, Daimler and General Motors, and even issued some licenses for experimental cars made by those companies and by academics. But such cars can be tested only if a qualified driver sits behind the wheel. California has licensed 98 such test vehicles from 10 companies; 73 of the cars belong to Google.”

Handling technology

Google, however, found itself at the center of the latest driverless controversy. When a Mountain View police officer pulled over a Google Autonomous Vehicle, he discovered there was no driver to ticket. But the issue went beyond that small irony. The driving infraction was a significant one — motoring too slowly. “There was no one at the wheel, but there was a Google operator sitting shotgun who explained to the officer how Google regulates the speed at which its autonomous cars drive,” CBS News reported. “According to California law, a self-driving car can only be operated on roads with speed limits that are at or under 35 mph, and Google caps its cars’ speed at 25 mph.”

The company responded by making the reassuring point that it didn’t want to frighten people by pegging its vehicles at higher speeds. But the episode reinforced concerns that the biggest problem with driverless cars was how human drivers might struggle to adapt to their presence on roads. Drivers, analysts have suggested, are accustomed to using human cues in order to make the constant judgment calls required behind the wheel.

Adding a complicating factor, at least one company has used a simple conceptual loophole to press ahead with self-driving technology, putting it to use in cars built for human drivers. “Tesla’s autopilot technology is still far from fully autonomous driving, but it’s moving in that direction with actual cars on the road,” CNET reported. “Today, Tesla Model S drivers can take their hands off the steering wheel while on the highway — though they’re not supposed to — and can also let the car parallel park itself.”

The move put the self-driving car under development by the tech titan — codename: Project Titan — at the center of a flurry of speculation, opinion and analysis. Citing documents it had obtained, the Guardian reported that Mike Maletic, a senior legal counsel, “had an hour-long meeting on 17 August with the department’s self-driving car experts Bernard Soriano, DMV deputy director, and Stephanie Dougherty, chief of strategic planning, who are co-sponsors of California’s autonomous vehicle regulation project, and Brian Soublet, the department’s deputy director and chief counsel.”

Alongside Google and Uber, that makes three Silicon Valley heavyweights lined up to crank out driverless cars at some point in the future, the Guardian added, noting “Google already has a fleet of robot cars on the streets of California and is planning to have several hundred built in the near future.”

Critical mass

But the competition in driverless cars has already heated up around the world. “According to the California DMV,” Fast Company noted, “their autonomous vehicle program has issued permits for testing to Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, Nissan, BMW, and Honda, along with Google and auto component manufacturers Delphi, Bosch, and Cruise Automation.” That program, begun at the start of this year, “is working on ways to guarantee autonomous vehicles are safe, tested, and meet quality and performance benchmarks.”

The race to deploy a robocar has led those companies, plus Toyota, Ford, and GM, to line the Valley’s main thoroughfare with research laboratories. The Central Expressway, reaching roughly from Stanford University to San Jose Mineta International Airport, has become so crowded with competitors that Apple’s penchant for secrecy may be at risk if it takes its cars out for a neighborhood spin. “Although Apple recently bought a 43-acre parcel in North San Jose, it doesn’t have much room in Silicon Valley to test its automotive ideas with the secrecy that usually surrounds its tiny devices,” the San Jose Mercury News surmised. “The question is: Would it be willing to test in public?”

Busy rivals

Traffic in secrecy has run both ways, however. Whatever Apple has under wraps, the Mercury News concluded, “its actions have contributed to a frenzy from rivals — especially in the auto industry — to take ownership of autonomous technology, in-car mapping software, vehicle-to-vehicle communication and dashboard Internet applications that could reshape the way we get around in the decades to come.”

To vault to the top of the pack, however, Apple would likely have to square off against Tesla, which has enjoyed a substantial head start. “In the next few years, Tesla has the potential to become the Apple of electric cars, even if Apple enters the industry,” according to Quartz. “The company will have four models on the streets — the Roadster, the S, the X, and the 3 — by the time Apple or any other competitor is likely to have a single model. Tesla will also have its Gigafactory — a massive production facility in Nevada that can produce up to 500,000 cars a year — up and running. If Tesla can bring down its prices, its cars could become a common sight on roads.” Of course, Tesla has automotive rivals of its own, with Audi, Mercedes and Porsche all poised to deliver electric vehicles in about five years or so.

Meanwhile, few inside the auto industry have thrown in the towel on more traditional vehicles. “When it comes to actually making cars, there is no reason to assume that Apple, with no experience, will suddenly do a better job than General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota, or Hyundai,” GM ex-chairman Bob Lutz told CNBC, predicting that Apple’s labors would become “a giant money pit.”

An unexpected trial

Both cars in the incident “were equipped with similar technology, including lasers, radar, cameras and computer systems enabling the cars to drive on their own without need of human drivers,” noted the Washington Post, which added that both also put “people behind the wheel in case of an emergency.”

During the close shave in Palo Alto, the near-victim rode in an Audi Q5 equipped with Delphi Automotive’s self-driving system. “As the Delphi vehicle prepared to change lanes, a Google self-driving prototype — a Lexus RX400h crossover fitted with similar hardware and software — cut off the Audi, forcing it to abort the lane change,” Reuters reported.

“Both companies previously have reported minor collisions of self-driving cars with vehicles piloted by people. In most of those cases, the self-driving car was stopped, typically at an intersection, and was rear-ended by another vehicle,” according to Reuters. Significantly, however, as the wire service noted, neither the companies nor the California DMV has deemed any self-driving car to have been at fault.

Doubling down

Google, for one, took the episode in stride. At a recent shareholder meeting, cofounder Sergey Brin personally praised the driverless program. “I’m very proud of the record of our cars,” he said, as CIO reported. “We don’t claim cars are going to be perfect. Our goal is to beat human drivers, and nothing can be a perfect vehicle.” The company has nearly doubled its number of permits for self-driving cars, according to DMV records obtained by CIO:

“The additional 25 permits are for a new fleet of prototype cars that are undergoing testing on private roads, the company said. The cars, tiny two-seaters, are designed for neighborhood driving and have a top speed of 25 miles per hour.”

Now making their appearance on Mountain View area roads, the little autos “are still equipped with a steering wheel, accelerator pedal and brake pedal, and a qualified driver will be there to take over if things go awry,” as Discover pointed out. “The cars drive conservatively. For instance, their speed is capped at 25 miles per hour. And they pause 1.5 seconds after a stoplight turns green ‘because many accidents happen during this time.'”

Google has taken an early lead on California streets, with Mercedes and other companies rounding out the field. But competition could ramp up quickly. “In just 15 years, by 2030, the self-driving car market is expected to reach a whopping $87 billion, according to a recent report by Lux Research,” Business Insider observed. “That helps explain why, in addition to the tech giants Google and Uber, just about every car manufacturer is working on the technology.”

Dealing with humans

Ironically, tech companies have surmised, the most dangerous thing about driverless cars could well be the way humans drive around them. Self-driving vehicles lack the visual cues — such as telltale hesitation, communication, and, of course, a human driver inside — that we use to navigate through traffic situations and at intersections. Unless this challenge can be measured, analyzed, and effectively met, Google and other companies will struggle to secure regulatory support for stripping the cars down to the bare essentials.

In fact, Google’s fleet of slow-moving two-seaters was expressly designed to test human reactions to driverless cars on the road. “If all goes well, Google hopes to gain regulatory clearance to remove the steering wheel, brake pedal and emergency driver from the prototype,” according to US News. “Company executives have expressed hope that self-driving cars using its technology will be joining the flow of daily traffic by the end of this decade.”