California officials have unveiled new regulations that would allow autonomous vehicles to operate on state roads in test projects without a human operator.
A revised regulation which could take effect in 2018 would eliminate a provision in an earlier draft that required “physical control by a natural person sitting in the vehicle’s driver’s seat” in any autonomous car.
The language was replaced with a requirement for “supervising the autonomous technology’s performance of the dynamic driving task.”
The California Department of Motor Vehicles said in the statement the change was made to remove a requirement which “could be unnecessarily limiting on the development of the technology” and to provide flexibility to allow remote monitoring.
The new rules come with a growing number of tech firms and automakers testing self-driving vehicles, and follows new guidelines from the federal government aimed at spurring the technology widely believed to improve road safety and reduce accidents.
