Comment from Anonymous

As a regular user of US roads, and a frequent pedestrian, I oppose any changes to rules governing the required basic driving controls of vehicles on the roads in the US. Having a manually operated braking system on vehicles should remain mandatory regardless of whether it is regularly human driven or an autonomous system. Having worked with and around industrial robots and autonomous systems in a manufacturing context, both where such systems interact with humans and are isolated from humans by safety barriers, there are always manual emergency stops for these systems. The ability of a human to override and stop the system without any involvement of the system's control is critical to a safe working environment and is generally legally mandatory. In most industrial autonomous systems these emergency stops bypass the autonomy systems entirely and manually actuate on either the primary system power and/or fail-safe braking systems that bring the system to an immediate stop. So should it be in automobiles, there should always be a system for someone to override any autonomous driving system and bring the vehicle to a passenger commanded stop in the event of a serious fault with the control software. You should never trust a human's life to software unless there is absolutely no other alternative, and with autonomous driving systems, there are plenty of alternatives, one of the most important is the ability to manually override and apply the braking system of the vehicle.