Senate driverless-car bill further jeopardized by pedestrian death
I think it s worth acknowledging the reality that this definitely makes passage more difficult, said Caleb Watney, a technology-policy associate at the libertarian R Street Institute. I think McConnell certainly has an excuse in his back pocket now, if he wants to get out of it.
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But Watney warned that such accidents even if they are inevitable are difficult for policymakers to discount so easily. Sunday s accident, he said, reminded him of the fatal 2016 crash of a Tesla Model S when the driver was utilizing the vehicle s semiautonomous Autopilot feature.That s still brought up at almost every single panel discussion about driverless cars several years later, and that wasn’t even a fully driverless car, said Watney. So I can only imagine that the first fatality from a car in autonomous mode is going to continue to have ripples for a long time to come.
