A new advocacy group is pushing state lawmakers to pass more stringent autonomous vehicle regulations. The group, Safe Autonomous Vehicles Everywhere in the United States (SAVE-US), says its goal is to ensure that new self-driving technology will save lives instead of doing harm. Its work has a clear target: Tesla.
The campaign, announced on Wednesday, counts among its goals passing legislation that would require tech developers to be clearer about the limits of their driving technology; report more specific and public crash information to states; and use multiple sensors on their vehicles. In the US, regulations governing autonomous vehicles are generally handled by the states, whose laws range from stringent (California) to relatively permissive (Arizona, Texas). Fourteen US states don’t have autonomous-vehicle-related laws at all. The group will initially target lawmakers in large states, including Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, says Shua Sanchez, the group’s national campaign director.
Sanchez and Bob Somers, SAVE-US’s technical adviser, met this summer outside an administrative hearing in Oakland, California. Inside, attorneys for California’s Department of Motor Vehicles argued that Tesla should temporarily lose its license to manufacture and sell vehicles in the state because, they alleged, the electric automaker had falsely advertised its Full Self-Driving and Autopilot driver assistance features.
Sanchez, a physicist, had been following Tesla closely since he got involved in the Tesla Takedown movement earlier this year, leading demonstrations outside of a showroom in Boston to protest CEO Elon Musk’s involvement with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Somers had worked as an engineer at the self-driving vehicle developer Zoox for half a decade. (He’s since left the autonomous vehicle industry.)
In Oakland, they agreed: Autonomous vehicle technology has the potential to save lives. But rushing the technology, or confusing customers about its limits, is unsafe and could doom the whole project. (An administrative judge is due to decide on the Tesla case later this year.)
“It’s fair to say that Tesla is the worst actor in this space, but that definitely doesn’t mean every other company is a perfect actor either,” says Sanchez. “If we don’t have good regulations in place, we leave the door open for any company to pursue an unsafe path.”
Unlike many of its competitors, which use pricier radars and lidars plus cameras, Tesla depends on vision-only software, arguing that more effective cameras and AI-trained software alone can safely pilot its vehicles. The tech strategy is at the center of one of Tesla’s chief promises: That one day, the cars it has already manufactured will be able to completely drive themselves thanks to a quick software update. Competitors, including Waymo and Zoox, use more expensive and purpose-built robotaxis to pull off their autonomous rides. Last week, the US federal government said it had opened an investigation of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) driver assistance software following reports that the feature, which is not autonomous and must be supervised by a driver behind the wheel, ran red lights and drove on the wrong side of the street.
“We want to encode the industry’s best practices into a framework to make sure that developers aren’t competing on safety,” says Somers, the former AV engineer. Safety, he means, should always be assumed with self-driving tech.
Tesla didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
SAVE-US declined to answer specific questions about its sources of funding. “SAVE-US is backed by a few funders who have an interest in autonomous vehicle technology and see a need for regulations right now,” says Jeff Coote, a spokesperson for the group.
The group does have links to political groups that have advocated for progressive causes and campaigns. Coote and SAVE-US executive director Sam Haass also work for Slingshot Strategies, a political consulting firm that mostly works with Democrats (though Coote notes the firm also works on bipartisan issues). Another firm with progressive links, Kinetic Strategies, worked on the advocacy group’s website.
Coote says putting firmer guardrails on autonomous vehicle technology could be a winning political issue. “If you look at AI and data centers, for instance, people are upset and scared of being taken advantage of by big companies and getting screwed over,” he says. “The same can be said for AVs; people are open to the technology, but only if assured it is deployed safely.”
