Driverless Cars Must Have Steering Wheels, Brake Pedals, Feds Say

Driverless cars should have a fairly easy time getting the green light to operate on U.S. roadways, as long as they look and act like the vehicles people have been driving for the past century. Take away the steering wheel and brake pedal--as Google hopes to do from its self-driving car--and that vehicle is no longer street legal and probably would not be for some time, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT). As carmakers move at full throttle on efforts to rethink the automobile, the DoT is scrambling to figure out how it can adjust decades of driver safety regulations to accommodate vehicles driven entirely by computers. DoT's Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center reviewed current Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and concluded that increasing levels of automation for parking, lane changing, collision avoidance and other maneuvers is acceptable, provided that the vehicle also has a driver's seat, steering wheel, brake pedal and other features commonly found in today's automobiles. Implementing more radical changes, such as using smartphone-control, replacing the windshield with large video displays or realigning seats so there is no clear "driver," would prevent approval under current safety standards, according to the new report.