The auto industry always has been a place that holds its secrets dear, trying to keep the look of its new models and the features they contain under wraps until the cars made it to the showroom.
That is one of a great many expectations laid out Tuesday as the government provided long-awaited guidance to companies developing the next generation of cars and to states, some of which already are seeing test vehicles on their roads.
“We’ve laid out, basically, standards, and we’re inviting the industry to tell us how they will meet those standards,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in presenting the 112-page document prepared by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Rather than embark on the long path required to create a formal regulation, the Transportation Department is working to nudge the industry along.
Industry executives were reluctant to commit to data sharing. Some acknowledged that sharing could prove helpful, but they said automakers are likely to differ on what they want to share.
David Strickland, counsel for the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which represents Google, Uber, Lyft, Ford and Volvo, said, “the devil is always within the details, for a number of the issues.”
Among the questions are what the federal government is hoping will be shared and why, he said.
“When you’re dealing with electronics, reliability and software, there’s a tremendous amount of data,” said Strickland, who headed NHTSA until 2014. “Too much data creates noise and is not effective.” Still, he said, industry is open to a “thoughtful approach” on sharing.
After the presentation, five senior NHTSA officials met with reporters to elaborate, on condition that their names not be used.
They pointed to the often cutthroat airline industry as a model of one that puts safety considerations ahead of competition. Airlines share data they collect with one another if it helps make flying safer.
“It started with four airlines and it [grew] to 40,” said one of the NHTSA officials. “Over time, this trust has built up, the amount of data has increased. It’s a different system, so you can’t do a copy and paste. But you can start with a small group, you can build trust over time, you can figure out which data is important to share and you gradually move forward.”
But will GM share its test data with Ford? Will Google share crash data with Tesla? Will all the automakers do data dumps into a repository maintained by someone, but probably not NHTSA or any other federal agency?
If one company has a spate of crashes, will their competition make hay of it?
“There are some aspects they may want to share,” said Raj Rajkumar, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who brought the university’s autonomous technology to Washington, where six such cars served as a backdrop for Foxx’s announcement. But “because it’s a very competitive industry, and it’s about a huge market in the future, sharing will be limited.”
Because the NHTSA document is intended as guidance, rather than a formal regulation, getting the players to share information may be a challenge.
The guidance stipulates that during testing and when fully autonomous cars begin driving, “data generated from these activities should be shared in a way that allows government, industry, and the public to increase their learning and understanding as technology evolves but protects legitimate privacy and competitive interests.”
It says companies should plan to share crash “and other relevant data.”
“Those are details that have yet to be fleshed out,” another of the NHTSA officials said, when asked just what data would be collected. “What we’re asking manufacturers and others is to make that a consideration as they’re going down this developmental path. The ultimate idea would be that this data would be shared . . . and all would have access to it.”
Some of the potentially lifesaving details federal officials hope companies share concern what they’re calling “edge cases,” those one in a million or one in a billion events that are difficult to predict but need to be written into self-driving software. There has been some industry discussion about sharing those scenarios, according to another NHTSA official.
“One of the real benefits of data sharing that we see as an agency and that the industry has talked about as well is sharing those scenarios,” the official said. “When you’re 16 and you get a license, you have to go out there and make that same mistake that everyone else has. You encounter a new scenario and have to learn how to deal with it, and hopefully remember that and be able to apply it in future situations.
“The benefit here is that not just one [person] will learn from that event one time,” he said. “It could be shared within that fleet of vehicles or potentially throughout the whole industry. And that kind of learning is going to make this all a lot safer over time, hopefully pretty quickly.”
Google, a pioneer in autonomous cars with vehicles on the road in several states, has argued that some data collection and sharing requirements are an unhelpful distraction. The California-based company cited that the state’s requirement that companies publish data on circumstances when humans must take back control of the car for some reason.
That requirement “resulted in manufacturers sharing broad data sets without any agreed, common definitions about what was being shared,” Google said in comments before NHTSA’s guidance was presented Tuesday.
“If NHTSA believes there is a value in a manufacturer sharing testing or deployment data, we recommend that the agency also set clear definitions of what data should be shared and with whom, to ensure that it is useful and informative,” Google said.
