No steering wheels? No thank you!

Ford and General Motors are asking the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to allow up to 5,000 Level 4 vehicles without steering wheels to operate on the nation’s interstates.

On Thursday, June 21, Ford and General Motors filed an exemption request with NHTSA regarding certain, traditional driver controls on public roadways. If granted, the vehicles will not be required to have steering wheels.

Ford is seeking exemptions from manually operated driving controls for up to 2,500 Level 4 autonomous vehicles. General Motors is essentially requesting the same thing, also for up to 2,500 vehicles.

Such controls include a steering wheel and everything behind and connected to it (e.g., windshield wiper control, etc.). Other equipment not included in some of these vehicles include pedals, manual turn signals and mirrors.

If this sounds crazy, it’s because it is.

Even crazier is Ford’s explanation regarding the safety factor of the exemption request. Essentially, having a steering wheel in its Level 4 vehicle will increase safety issues.

“Ford states that, given that human occupants are not intended to participate in the driving task while the vehicle is being operated in AV Mode, Ford believes having active driving controls and communications would introduce an unacceptable risk to safety.”

Are we ready for Level 4 vehicles on the public roadways?

Take a look at Tesla vehicles. Owners are getting into fatal crashes with the Level 2 autonomous technology, and we want to skip to Level 4?

Granted, all vehicles within the exemption are owned and operated by the manufacturers. Individual consumers will not have access to these vehicles. Also, there is a way for the operator to manually override the system. However, those details are not expressed in the exemption request.

Regardless, Tesla is known to be on the cutting edge of autonomous vehicle technology, and that is not going so well for it. Anything can happen with a Level 4 vehicle that the public does not want to find out the hard way.

Trucking companies are constantly asking for hours-of-service exemptions, many of which get turned down. If hours of service is too important to exempt, then how can we justify no steering wheels at this point?

We can’t.

Cellphones have been around longer than high-level autonomous vehicles. How many times a day does your phone crap out on you in some way?

Technology advances at a snail’s pace for good reasons. If we expedite that process, we can find ourselves in a lot of trouble.

ELDs were never proven, but we mandated them anyway. How did that work out?

You can let NHTSA know about your concerns on the matter by commenting on the exemption request here. LL