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WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government on Tuesday released its first-ever federal automated vehicle policy for the "responsible" introduction of self-driving cars onto American roads.
"Automated vehicles have the potential to save thousands of lives, driving the single biggest leap in road safety that our country has ever taken," said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement.
"This policy is an unprecedented step by the federal government to harness the benefits of transformative technology by providing a framework for how to do it safely."
At the center of the policy was a 15 point "Safety Assessment" that the U.S. government expects automakers to comply with for the design, development, testing, and deployment of highly automated vehicles -- cars that can take over some or all of the driving task.
The safety requirements included how and where the vehicle is supposed to operate; its response to a system failure or crash; data recording and information sharing; privacy considerations; approaches to guard against vehicle hacking risk; as well as how vehicles are programmed to address conflict dilemmas on the road.
In an op-ed published by the newspaper Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, President Barack Obama said self-driving cars have "gone from sci-fi fantasy to an emerging reality" since he took office in 2009.
"Safer, more accessible driving. Less congested, less polluted roads. That's what harnessing technology for good can look like," Obama wrote. "But we have to get it right. Americans deserve to know they'll be safe today even as we develop and deploy the technologies of tomorrow."
Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a final enforcement guidance bulletin clarifying how its recall authority will apply to automated vehicle technologies.
Specifically, it may recall semi-autonomous driving systems that "fail to adequately account for the possibility that a distracted or inattentive driver-occupant might fail to retake control of the vehicle in a safety-critical situation."
