Self-driving commercial vehicles would need to have a human driver present under a bill advancing in the Iowa House.
A few cities in the U.S. have driverless rideshare services. The bill (HF 2375) would require those services and any other self-driving commercial vehicles to have a licensed driver in the car.
Tamara Marcus, a lobbyist for Teamsters Local 238, a labor union that includes various commercial drivers, said the bill is important because there have been some accidents involving driverless vehicles.
“Our position is that the technology just isn’t there yet to safely have these commercial vehicles on the roads,” Marcus said. “This is really a public safety issue for us.”
Michael Triplett, a lobbyist for the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a company made up of car manufacturers, said driverless car regulations should be left to the federal government.
“We think the future, in some circumstances, will involve places you go without a human driver involved,” he said. “Uber and Tesla and a bunch of different companies are already testing this out in certain places.”
Triplett said the bill would restrict driverless transportation run by airports.
A separate bill that advanced specifies that the owner of a self-driving vehicle is liable for injuries, damage and traffic violations.