Congress urged to revive long-stalled debate about regulating self-driving vehicles

Currently AV manufacturers can deploy a maximum of 2,500 self-driving vehicles for testing, provided they have permission from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. AV advocates have complained that the limits represent a bottleneck that is holding back the growth of the industry at a crucial time. Industry advocates argued Wednesday that accidents involving self-driving vehicles are exaggerated and that the machines are already far more reliable than human beings. But auto safety advocates have cast doubt on industry claims about the safety of autonomous vehicles and the numbers they use to back up those claims. Robotaxis from Cruise are eight times more likely to get into a crash than humans, she said, while autonomous vehicles from Waymo, a spinoff of Google, are four times more likely than humans to crash.