The agency is giving independent automakers until the end of July to find a solution.
The US Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is seeking action from autonomous vehicle makers after identifying “a clear pattern of driverless AVs interfering with law enforcement and other first responders” in recent months. Jonathan Morrison, the organization’s director, has written a letter to developers and issued a call to action. Emergencies are not rare or “edge cases,” he writes, so he wants AV developers and operators to focus their resources on fixing the problem quickly.
Although NHTSA didn’t provide specific examples, there have been stories about self-driving cars interfering with ambulances and fire trucks, like the one pictured above, for years. After a fatal shooting at a bar in Austin, Texas in March, a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance responding to the incident. While the officer was able to get the Waymo robotaxi out of the way, it took them a few minutes to solve the problem.
In accordance with It has stringsemergency leaders told regulators during a meeting in March that they are frustrated with the behavior of autonomous vehicles on the roads. They said they had to spend time in emergencies solving problems with frozen or stuck vehicles. Officials in San Francisco and Austin, where Waymo’s robot service has been operating for a long time, said the company’s vehicles have been getting worse. Apparently they were seeing a “backlash” in the performance of AVs, with cars now committing traffic violations.
San Francisco Fire Department Chief Patrick Rabbitt is reported to have said that Waymo vehicles recently froze and blocked fire stations and department trucks. Austin officials echoed Nogwaja’s comments. Waymo vehicles were also “frozen” in the city and could not see the hand signals of first responders. Dealing with a company’s robotaxis costs them valuable time and prevents them from responding to emergencies in a timely manner.
“Every second counts when law enforcement, firefighters or emergency services respond to a call because people’s lives are at risk. That’s why human drivers who interfere with this operation are fined and even jailed,” Morrison wrote in his letter. “Therefore, if an AV interferes with the first responders or prevents an emergency vehicle, it ceases to be a small software problem. The technology driving next to them must support their efforts and get out of the way, not interfere with their life-saving work or compound the risks they face.”
Morrison said NHTSA will schedule meetings with autonomous vehicle makers at the end of July to hear their solutions, giving them less than a month to respond to the agency’s call.
