Although Apple’s plans for the world of self-driving cars remain opaque, the tech behemoth has taken a keen interest in the federal government’s new policy on autonomous vehicles.
In five pages of comments submitted to regulators, a top Apple executive outlined the company’s position on the new Federal Automated Vehicles Policy and offered suggestions on how it could be clarified to accelerate the process of putting test vehicles on U.S. roads.
The letter gave no hint on whether or when Apple is planning to introduce its own autonomous vehicles or provide self-driving technology to another company that produces cars. But Steve Kenner, director of product integrity at Apple, nonetheless conveyed enthusiasm for a foray into autonomous vehicles.
“The company is investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation,” he wrote in comments submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Nov. 22.
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“By sharing data, the industry will build a more comprehensive dataset than any one company could
create alone.” – Steve Kenner, Apple
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His comments generally supported the major planks of the Federal Automated Vehicles Policy, which federal leaders unveiled in late September, including plans for a 15-point safety assessment of autonomous cars and the development of a network in which competing companies could share anonymized data on autonomous crashes and near misses.
“By sharing data, the industry will build a more comprehensive dataset than any one company could create alone,” Kenner wrote. “This will allow everyone in the industry to design systems to better detect and respond to the broadest set of nominal and edge-case scenarios.”
Kenner emphasizes these shared datasets should be stripped of any identifying data to ensure motorist and vehicular privacy. He went further, proposing that the auto industry should create privacy standards that are more stringent than the ones adopted by the Auto Alliance, the main lobbying arm of major OEMs, in November 2014.
Apple’s top concern isn’t necessarily one that arises in the policy, but it’s one that a revised policy could potentially fix. A provision in the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, enacted into law in December 2015, permits established manufacturers to test new technologies on public roads without the need to receive an exemption from federal motor vehicle safety standards. But that doesn’t extend to newer entrants into transportation.
“To maximize the safety benefits of automated vehicles, encourage innovation, and promote fair competition, established manufacturers and new entrants should be treated equally,” Kenner wrote.
While NHTSA can’t override the FAST Act–that would require an act of Congress–regulators could amend the policy to state that exemptions are not required for testing of vehicles on public roads, as long as they are never used by the general public. NHTSA has already signaled its willingness to give prompt attention to the exemption process to help new innovations that may not conform to the safety standards.
In a separate section of its comments on the policy, Apple said that, while it supports the 15-point safety assessment, it’s concerned about a section that asks companies to submit documents four months before testing on public roads takes place.
“As written, the safety assessment provision of the policy could be interpreted as requiring preapproval by NHTSA prior to testing,” Kenner wrote. “This could result in a testing blackout period while NHTSA reviews the safety assessment.”
Overall, Apple offered NHTSA high compliments on the policy development, something the agency isn’t accustomed to receiving from the industry it regulates. Apple praised portions that included a discussion of ethical considerations that should be incorporated into vehicle development, the encouragement of the data-sharing network, and a push for model state policies that would help avoid a patchwork approach that subjects manufacturers to different laws in different states.
In July, Apple undertook a high-profile shift in the direction of its autonomous-car project—if developments in a secret project can be described as high profile. The company, which has never publicly acknowledged that it’s working on a vehicle, tapped longtime executive Bob Mansfield to take over its self-driving-car program, dubbed Project Titan, according to many reports.
While Kenner’s letter to NHTSA didn’t delve into details of how Apple intends to deploy its machine learning and automated technologies in the realm of transportation, it does, if anything, confirm that the project exists and that Apple remains hard at work.
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