(Bloomberg) – Self-driving cars must increase safety at least twofold to make a real dent in the 38,000 lives lost on American roads last year, the U.S. auto-safety chief said as the federal government prepares to release rules for autonomous vehicles next month.
"I'd actually like to throw the gauntlet down," Mark Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said Wednesday at a conference in Novi, Michigan. "We need to start with two times better. We need to set a higher bar if we expect safety to actually be a benefit here."
Rosekind wouldn't disclose specifics of the autonomous-auto regulations he said U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx will announce in July. The NHTSA chief said those rules will speed the deployment of self-driving cars, which should begin to reduce road deaths that jumped last year to 38,300 from 32,675 in 2014.
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