The Driverless Commute: Is It Still Too Soon For Parking Lot Deployment? South Korea Plans Massive Smart-Road Investment Ahead Of Avs; And European Carmakers Beginning To Bristle At Tough Regs

Welcome again to the Driverless Commute, presented by Dentons, a digest clocking the most important technical, legal and regulatory developments shaping the path to global autonomy.

1. Parking lots: the next great frontier

A decade after Google launched its famous self-driving moonshot, the central question of the technology's readiness and safety remains an unresolved scramble of ethics and profit.

No one—not car makers, technologists, regulators, or consumer safety advocates—can agree on specific standards of accepted safety for the open-road testing of autonomous vehicles.

The still-high motor vehicle fatality rate, which has been on steady decline in the United States since the 1960s, belies a truth about driving: it's already a remarkably safe activity. Here in the US, there's approximately one death recorded for every 100 million miles driven. Despite this relative safety, most stakeholders agree that autonomous vehicles will save lives, at least eventually. But it's also become increasingly clear that that self-driving cars will similarly claim them as the technology matures out in the wild. The question, then, is whether this Faustian bargain is one the public (or policymakers) will abide.

But what if the technology could prove itself in a decidedly smaller but still relevant context? Enter: parking lots, where it's estimated that roughly 20 percent of all vehicle accidents occur.

The advantages of this more-restrained approach are easy enough to understand—generally cars are operating at much slower speeds in parking lots, and the occurrence of serious injury and death are lower than the open road—but that's not to say parking lot deployments aren't without their own pitfalls, as Tesla learned last month when it updated eligible vehicles' software to include a new remote control-like feature to maneuver through parking lots autonomously.

For Tesla, whose chief executive pledged to enable full self-driving by the end of 2020, the move marked an important technological leap. To some, it also marked a more circumspect approach to deployment. Others still saw it as an invitation to chaos.

The Smart Summon feature requires the car's owner be located no more than 200 feet from the vehicle; that they maintain a direct line of sight to the vehicle; and that they remain actively engaged with a smart-phone remote application. Based on observations by reporters and users, it's believed that summoned cars travel at a maximum speed of 6 miles...