is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
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Tesla and other automakers working on Level 2 and higher driving systems would be required to restrict their vehicles to specific road types or clearly defined operational domains under a new bill introduced today by Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey (D).
Operational design domains, or ODDs, are a set of conditions, either geographic or weather-related, in which an autonomous or partially autonomous vehicle can operate. Examples include the city maps in which Waymo’s Level 4 autonomous robotaxis operate, or the highways where GM’s hands-free Super Cruise can be used.
But the bill, called the Stay in Your Lane Act, appears to be mostly aimed at Tesla, which has enabled its customers to use its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system on any road, including in cities and low-speed residential neighborhoods, generally without restrictions. Under the bill, Tesla would be required to dial back FSD’s operational domain to a “safer” road environment defined by the company.
Stay in Your Lane Act
“Self-driving cars aren’t a danger of the distant future—they are a pressing safety threat today,” Markey said in a statement to The Verge. “Too often, certain car companies are rolling out autonomous driving features without responsible limitations on when and where they can be used, leading to avoidable injuries and deaths. My Stay in Your Lane Act would help keep the public safe by ensuring self-driving cars only operate in the road conditions that the system is smart enough to handle.”
Markey’s office notes in a one-pager on the bill that most Level 2 systems, like GM’s Super Cruise or Ford’s BlueCruise, are restricted to “pre- mapped roads where the engineers have designed the technology to safely operate.” The bill would make that voluntary design decision a requirement of automakers working on this technology.
The legislation doesn’t require the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to go through a lengthy rulemaking process. Instead, it creates “a brightline statutory requirement for manufacturers to define a safe operational design domain for their driving system, and to restrict the driving systems to that domain,” the one-pager explains. Under this authority, NHTSA can investigate or fine companies that breach their operational design domains, or define their domains “too broadly” where the system can no longer safely operate.
As a Democratic sponsored bill in a Republican controlled Congress, Markey’s legislation likely faces an uphill battle. That said, if Democrats reclaim the majority after the midterm elections, its likely that the bill could face a smoother path to adoption.