How Google's aggressive lobbying put it in a leadership position to shape regulation for driverless cars
Reuters : Tweets: @reuters and @reuters Tweets: @reuters : Driverless vehicles could save 33,000 American lives a year. And they could kill 2.6 million jobs. http://www.reuters.com/... @reuters : Google says requiring human controls makes driverless cars useless for elderly and disabled: http://www.reuters.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Reuters piece lands after a year in which Google fought the rules it would live under: it pushed back on [[a:838045|California DMV draft rules mandating steering wheels, pedals, and specially certified drivers]], arguing such controls would make its cars useless for elderly and disabled riders. In March it broadened the front, joining GM, Lyft, and Delphi in asking a Senate panel for federal self-driving regulation to pre-empt a patchwork of 53 bills across 23 states.
The lobbying push sits against an uneven safety record Google itself disclosed — 13 near-miss incidents over 14 months with 272 interventions, followed by what may be its first fault-involved collision, a 2mph hit on a public bus reported to the DMV. The tension between that record and Google's regulatory influence is why this story matters.
First-order effects
- Google's lobbying position gives it outsized say over whether federal rules follow its no-steering-wheel design or the DMV's human-controls template — a direct fork for its vehicle program and for riders who can't drive.
Second-order effects
- GM, Lyft, and Delphi gain from riding Google's federal-preemption play rather than fighting state-by-state, while the 2.6 million driving jobs the report flags become a bargaining chip opponents of light-touch rules can wield.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, autonomous-vehicle regulation gets written largely by the firms being regulated — a template other AI domains could inherit, where disclosure of incidents like the bus collision coexists with industry-shaped rulemaking.
The trend: Autonomous-vehicle policy is consolidating around federal frameworks drafted with heavy input from the companies deploying the technology, displacing state-level rulemaking.