PHOENIX — With hundreds of autonomous vehicles already on Arizona roads, Gov. Doug Ducey is laying out some new, stricter rules.
In an extensive executive order Thursday, the governor now requires that any company wanting to operate driverless vehicles comply with voluntary standards adopted last year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Those standards require things like crash-avoidance capability, and the ability of the vehicle to detect objects and respond.
Ducey’s order also contains new safety requirements.
Most notable is that the vehicles be programmed to go into a “minimal risk condition” if there is a problem with the programming or if the vehicle encounters something it does not understand.
That could mean pulling over to the side of the road and, if necessary, shutting down.
The vehicles will be required to understand some of the things expected of human operators, such as knowing to pull over to the side when an emergency vehicle is approaching.
The vehicles have to comply with all traffic laws and the operator can be cited — even if the operator turns out to be the corporation that built the vehicle and there’s no one behind the wheel.
Ducey issued his first executive order about autonomous vehicles in 2015, allowing their designers to begin testing them on Arizona roads with minimal state oversight and regulation.
That policy paid off the next year as Uber moved some test vehicles here from California. That came after Uber rejected the demands of California transportation officials that they be specially licensed and registered as test vehicles.
Kirk Adams, Ducey’s chief of staff, said Arizona is now ready for more specific regulations.
“Back in 2015, there were really only one or two companies that were really active in this state in some kind of large way,” Adams said.
Now, he said, the state is getting inquiries from multiple corporations interested in trying out their technology on Arizona roads.
“We want to make sure that whoever is testing in Arizona is doing so at the most rigorous safety standards,” he said.
Added gubernatorial press aide Daniel Scarpinato, “We don’t want Joe’s Driverless Car Company to be putting some jalopy with bad technology on the road that doesn’t fit the federal standards.”
He said the NHTSA standards set the baseline for the vehicles and the technology.
“And we as a state will regulate the roads and the public safety,” Scarpinato said.
Adams said Chandler police are working with Waymo to hammer out some of the protocols, such as having autonomous vehicles go into a “safe state” as necessary.
