Audi Legal Boss Talks the Future of Self-Driving
When it comes to self-driving vehicles, Audi’s chief counsel says the laws will be almost as complicated as the tech.
Imagine walking into your favorite restaurant, bar, or café, and asking everyone who loved driving to raise their hand. What percentage of folks do you think would do it? If I was being overly optimistic? I’d guess around 25 percent — but the reality is it’d probably be far less. So as heretical as it might sound to enthusiasts, self-driving cars are absolutely going to happen. Because when people are offered the option of safely surrendering the task of driving to their car? They’ll jump at it. Mark my words.
That said, how exactly the transition to self-driving cars will work remains murky. Which makes recent comments from Uta Klawitter, Head of General Counsel Legal Services at Audi, extremely interesting. In an interview posted on the company’s media site, she looks at some of the biggest challenges facing self-driving cars, and while her perspective is focused more on Germany and Europe at large, they offer a roadmap that could easily adapted for our shores. As you might expect, reams of new regulations will need to be written.
At this point, the laws surrounding Level 4 vehicles — which can drive themselves but still allow for human intervention — are still unclear. Here’s what Klawitter had to say about developments on the legal landscape:
In Europe, we can safely say that we will see functions like highway pilots for long distances by 2030. However, I don’t really think that we will be able to sleep while driving into the weekends. For ownership vehicles, meaning cars that are used privately, the technical regulations for approving L4 functionality do not exist yet in Europe. We expect those in 2024 at the earliest. Apart from that, regulations for using highly automated driving functions within the bounds of each country’s national road traffic laws still need to be introduced.
Along with the legal framework, however, is the next-generation technology that will need to be developed to allow Level 5 vehicles to operate freely. There’s also the question of how ready the population at large will be for it:
The biggest challenge will definitely be the technology itself. It has to enable a highly automated driving function that is convincingly smooth and, above all, safe. Only then – and this is the second challenge – will it gain social acceptance and the corresponding trust. For me, the third challenge is also clear: we need to harmonize the regulations at the international, or at least the European level. Otherwise, the area where vehicles can be used across national borders will be limited and the technical differences will be extremely complex due to the different national vehicular traffic law requirements.
All that makes sense to me. But as someone who lives in the United States, and is sincerely interested in the prospect of self-driving vehicles on my local streets, I found her comments on the market here to be particularly interesting.
But the high demand for safety, which is simply expected at this point and correspondingly legally protected, is also important. We sometimes see a different approach in the two other trailblazing markets, the US and China. In the US, people are more curious about technical innovations and therefore tolerate more risks. By contrast, German legislators are rightly open to this evolutionary technology in smaller steps in order to minimize the possible risks.
Now, as someone who tends to think the United States is overly litigious and risk-averse, that came as a surprise to me. Because in the States? It took the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration almost a decade to approve modern headlight technology for use on our roads. That foot-dragging, of course, is in stark contrast to the fact that Tesla has been allowing customers to beta test its “full self-driving” software without so much as a peep from authorities — even when it’s literally programmed to break the law.
So I guess when it comes to autonomous vehicles? We’re still very much the wild west. For more insight onto this next step in the evolution of the automobile, make sure to check out the full interview.
Photos: Audi