California Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday signed a law for driverless cars to travel on public roadways, showing once again that Left Coast has a way of making car-makers develop faster.
It is not that smart minds in Japan and Germany aren't already working on driverless cars. But with most new technologies, engineers want to make sure that they are safe enough before large production. The California law will allow them to travel on the state's roadways if there is an experienced driver sitting in the driving seat to take over if needed.
“Today, we're looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality,” Gov. Brown said during a news conference at Google's headquarters. “This driverless car is another step forward in this long march of California and leading not just the country, but the whole world.”
The state often uses stricter laws to control greenhouse gases and global warming, which was strongly against by most car-makers in other states, saying it would be impractical for each state to make its own fuel standards. However, the U.S. EPA(环境保护署) sided with California . At last all sides reached an agreement, but the push from California undoubtedly influenced the EPA's sharply higher fuel standards, which require car-makers to achieve an average of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.
When it comes to driverless cars, California is actually the third state to authorize(批准) them, behind Nevada and Florida. But by far it is the most influential. “It's meaningful because California is a big state, a first mover and really a big player,” Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington who studies autonomous transport law, told the New York Times.
