Earlier this year, dozens of autonomous vehicles from the Chinese company Baidu suddenly stopped in their tracks in Wuhan, China, triggering major chaos and sparking alarm among lawmakers in Beijing.
Not much later, the country’s government decided to stop issuing new licenses for new autonomous vehicles altogether, as Bloomberg reported last week, once again highlighting persistent pain points in the rollout of the tech — not to mention how far Beijing is willing to go to intervene when things go south.
As Fortune points out, a strikingly similar situation is playing out in the United States — yet federal regulations are nowhere in sight. Robotaxis from both Waymo and Tesla are still relying on human operators, stealing luggage, or colliding with objects and animals in the streets. Federal regulators are even investigating a Waymo vehicle crashing into a child outside of an elementary school.
A massive power outage in San Francisco caused Waymo’s fleet to clog up the city’s streets late last year, forcing the company to shut down the service entirely in a debacle eerily reminiscent of the March incident in Wuhan.
In short, it’s an endless list of collisions and near misses that should have any federal government consider pausing new licenses for autonomous vehicles, like in China.
But for now, there’s been no sign of the type of sweeping action that China is clearly willing to take. Instead, autonomous vehicle regulations largely rely on a patchwork of rules that vary state by state. The country has no federal autonomous vehicle safety law, Fortune reports, while a bipartisan House bill remains no more than a draft and previous attempts have stalled.
In the absence of enforced federal safety rules, the robotaxi industry continues to take off across the country. According to Morgan Stanley estimates, the number of autonomous rides in the US is expected to spike from 15 million last year to 36 million this year. By 2030, that number could grow massively, hitting nearly 750 million.
As the industry grows, though, so could the number of incidents. Government data has also shown that robotaxis are becoming a significant drain on public resources.
At least municipalities in California now have a way to fight back. Thanks to recently introduced rules by the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, robotaxis are no longer exempt from traffic citations, allowing law enforcement to hold the companies behind them accountable for violating traffic laws.
It remains unclear how long China’s pause on new autonomous vehicle licenses will last — but chances are that Chinese operators could soon find themselves under even more scrutiny.
More on robotaxis: AV Companies Might be in Trouble Now As Cops Start Ticketing Driverless Cars
The post China Presses Pause on Self-Driving Taxis Nationwide After Issue Where They Blocked Streets. America Could Learn a Lot appeared first on Futurism.
