This represents, then, the first time you can buy a self-driving car, in the true sense of the word. If you live in Europe. Because when it comes to the U.S. market, Audi’s concerns include uncertainty about how federal and state laws will apply to that system, a spokesperson says.1 Where Germany passed a law last year making this sort of thing explicitly legal, the federal government has not American it. Didn’t do much of anything.
“I think the law gets a lot of blame,” says Bryant Walker Smith, a legal scholar at the University of South Carolina School of Law who studies self-driving vehicles. Audi itself has pointed out that the lack of federal rulemaking means that this system is legal, by virtue of not being illegal. But in the absence of pre-emptive approval at the national level, the automaker appears concerned that state laws will cause headaches. New York’s 1971 requirement that drivers keep at least one hand on the wheel could cause problems, if anyone decided to enforce it. New California regulations could subject the commercial deployment of Audi automated vehicles to a range of requirements, from educating customers, including those buying a used vehicle, to collecting data in the event of a collision. This law does not apply to systems now on the road, but it may apply to Traffic Jam Pilot, because it reduces a human from observer to backup driver. More power, more responsibility, you know?
Meanwhile, the less capable systems available today risk derailing the future before Audi can get there. The National Transportation Safety Board, which last year criticized Tesla’s Autopilot feature for allowing human drivers to abuse it, is investigating another fatal crash, this one involving a Model And the hits continue: On Monday, the driver of a Tesla Model S claimed the car was in Autopilot mode when it crashed into a parked fire truck — and Tesla wasn’t the first to do so.
“I don’t think these incidents have changed the tone of developers or regulators, but it’s easy to imagine that the increased scrutiny has encouraged Audi to keep its new system out of the US — at least for now,” Walker-Smith says. Or perhaps the Germans need more time to make sure their system can handle particularly American difficulties, such as trail markings that look very different from Montana than from Mississippi and from Massachusetts.
Whatever the answer, it’s a reminder that no matter how fast the future of driving moves, our understanding of how to handle the cars that will get us there still lags behind.
The story was updated at 14:50 ET on Tuesday 15 May to include comments from an Audi spokesperson.
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